Kryptokos
by Atlantima
Summary: "Look, I know 'everything's permitted' but this is basic biology! Men. Do not. Get pregnant." "And Abstergo doesn't control the world. And DNA doesn't record memories." Turns out the Apple of Eden made Desmond pregnant. And he didn't even get to have sex first! He's not going to be happy about this. Mpreg, no pairing, slightly AU, post-ACIII, OC appearances, angst and fluff.
1. Prologue

**Be forewarned: This fanfiction contains:**

- male pregnancy (but no sex) (well, a little sex in two later chapters)  
>- moderate spoilers for pretty much all of the games from AC1 to AC4<br>- appearances of original characters alongside canon characters  
>- a slightly alternate universe (somebody didn't die, but someone else did, and the Assassins HQ was discovered by Templars)<br>- also contains lots of angst and swear words

Does that sound like your cup of tea? Well then, **on to the story!**

* * *

><p>November 2012<p>

Desmond awoke feeling sickened. Scrambling frantically out of the smelly sleeping bag, he staggered for a few feet, fell to his knees, and vomited into the abyss.

"What the fuck, mate?" Shaun was already up - did that man ever sleep in the first place? - and was staring from his workstation.

He spat a final fetid remnant over the edge and wiped his mouth. "Bad dream..."

"So bad you had to puke?"

"Yeah." Desmond would have liked to give a more witty reply, something like "Well, I **did** puke, so obviously it **was** bad enough to make me puke," but his mind was still grappling with the brutal scene that had bubbled up from the past. _Dead soldiers... so much blood... Whose memory was that, anyway? I didn't recognize any of it. Must have been something Clay relived. Great. As if bleeding from my own ancestors wasn't bad enough, now all of his skeletons are in my brain-closet too._

Shaun's mouth was moving but Desmond didn't catch the words. He rubbed his head, trying to coax away the pounding within. "Uh, can you repeat that? I've got some sort of weird genetic memory hangover thing messing me up here."

"I was saying, you better not be expecting any sick leave. We need to find that key. Tick tock."


	2. Something Growing

January 2013

It was supposed to be a routine physical, just to make sure he was alright after what happened in the Grand Temple. Desmond felt fine. There was nothing wrong with him, excepting, of course, the periodic tenderness in those newly-earned scars on his right arm. He'd gained a few pounds, sure, but that was just because he was stressed out about all this Assassin stuff and tended to cope with it by overeating. The random aches and dizzy spells he chalked up to all that time in the Animus.

But Rebecca insisted that he undergo a complete workup. "Even if you're perfectly fine, we really should compare the data from Abstergo's medical records to your current state. We could learn so much about the effects of the Animus and the Apple, or even how to give more people Eagle Vision!"

So Stacey ran a whole battery of tests. She checked his blood pressure, height, and weight, and was nice enough not to make any comments about the latter.

She poked all over his body, looked in his mouth, eyes, and ears, then in his eyes again while he activated Eagle Vision, although she said she didn't see anything different while it was on: "I'm betting that whatever the mechanism is must be in either the optic nerves or the brain itself."

The medic wrapped up the exam by taking samples of everything: blood, urine, stool, sperm even! He was starting to feel like a test subject again, though he had to admit Stacey had a much nicer bedside manner than anyone at Abstergo. _Plus she's not gonna kill me when she's done. That's a **huge** improvement._

Then the next day, she summoned him back and said she needed **more** samples. "What the hell, did you lose the ones from yesterday?!"

"The results came back really weird. I want to recheck them to be sure."

"Weird like how?"

"Where do I start?" She pulled a printout from his voluminous medical file. "Progesterone 12 nanograms per milliliter? Thousands of units of hCG? Thyroid, testosterone, everything's off! Not to mention this ridiculously low sperm count."

Aside from the last two, Desmond had no idea what any of that meant, but he acquiesced to her demands for more samples.

"I don't understand, this is almost identical to the first time I ran them," Stacey told him when the results came back. "It's like you're... Heh."

"What is it?" He was beginning to feel worried. "What's happening to me?"

"I don't know, Desmond. But for some reason, all your labs look like they're from a pregnant woman."

He echoed her nervous chuckle. That wasn't possible. Was it? "I, uh, I did throw up a few mornings." He tried to make it sound like a joke. "But that was just the Animus fucking with me, right?"

Stacey sounded slightly exasperated as she said, "Get back on the cot and lie down." Once he'd done so, the medic lifted his shirt and palpated his stomach, but this time there was a different quality to her touches than the initial exam the other day. Like she was feeling for something specific.

Desmond appeared calm, but as he watched her, his mind was going crazy. He saw- really saw for the first time- how his abdominal muscles were only replaced by flabbiness around the belly. He hadn't gotten fat anywhere else but there.

_It's impossible!_ he thought, but another part of his brain responded by rattling off: _secret societies, ancient gods, reliving the past, seeing the future, Eagle Vision, Adam and Eve, mind control, world-destroying solar flares-_ "Oww!"

She pulled back her hand at his sudden yelp. It seemed she had prodded something that was really tender. "Stacey, what the fuck was that?"

"Uh... I'm not sure exactly."

He was scared now, but tried to mask it with anger. "Well you better figure it out!"

"What's going on?" They looked up to see William in the doorway of the infirmary. Neither one knew how to respond. Both had the same impossible suspicion.

"He, uh... There's something... growing in him," Stacey finally managed to stammer.

"Something growing in him?" William's brow furrowed even more than usual. "Is it cancerous?"

"I, uh, don't think so."

"You don't **think** so." He shot her a piercing look, knowing she was holding something back. "Why don't you tell me the whole story?"

Stacey paled under his powerful gaze. "I will, Mr. Miles. As soon as I know it myself."


	3. Through Knowledge, Sorrow

Once his father had left them alone again, Desmond sat up and spoke softly to the Assassins' medic.

"You, uh... you really think I'm..." He couldn't say it, couldn't even think it. The very concept was ludicrous.

"I know, it's crazy. But your hormone levels... they are what I'd expect from someone nearing the end of the first trimester."

"But how? I don't even have the right equipment!"

"Maybe not externally. But, uh..." Stacey gestured to his midriff. He hadn't yet pulled his shirt back down to cover the pudge.

"No way."

"Well..." She pressed her fingers into the exposed skin, trying to be more gentle this time.

"Aagh." The noise he made was derived half from pain and half from being presented evidence of the uncomfortable, unbelievable, unimaginable diagnosis.

"That... that sure feels like a uterus to me."

Desmond shoved her hand away and crossed his arms. "No way. It's gotta be something else. I... I haven't even..." He scowled down at his traitorous gut._ Haven't even had sex. Not since... fuck, I can't even remember._ He tried to recall, but could only retrieve memories of Ezio's various conquests. _I haven't gotten any actual, present-day action in forever, even before all this Assassin shit hit the fan!_ He shook his head in frustrated confusion. "Hell, even if I had, this still wouldn't make any sense!"

"Well, if a uterus can suddenly appear inside you," Stacey reasoned, "is it any weirder for it to appear with an embryo already inside?"

"Why is this happening to me?" He suddenly found himself on the verge of tears.

"You said you had," she almost said 'morning sickness' but changed her mind at the last moment, "episodes of vomiting. When was that?"

"Couple months ago...in the Temple," he sobbed. God, I'm actually crying now! Fucking hormones!

"This is just a guess, but it could be related to the Apple of Eden."

"Great! Just great! That damn thing already took over my body once! And now it's happening again!"

"Shh!" She tried to quiet his outburst, but it was too late. William had heard his son's anguish and now burst back into the infirmary.

"**What's** happening again, Ms. Russ? And don't bullshit me this time!"

"It's that stupid Apple, Dad! It screwed with my insides! Knocked me up!" Desmond blurted without thinking. As soon as the words were out, he mentally kicked himself. _Stupid! Stupid! Could have just got Stacey to cut the fucker out! He didn't have to know!_ Even though Desmond had done nothing to cause it, he felt incredibly ashamed of the situation.

"What?" Surely his son had said "fucked me up" and he'd just misheard.

Stacey's mind raced, frantically searching for the best way to explain. "It seems that Desmond... somehow has... a uterus."

The elder Assassin gaped, truly at a loss for words.

"And it appears to be... occupied."

William slumped against the wall. "You're saying he's **pregnant**?" He sounded justifiably incredulous.

"Yeah, but not for long!" Desmond declared. "Get rid of it, Stacey! I want this out of me, yesterday!"

"I- I don't think I can do that."

"You have to!"

"I would, but... You're talking about a hysterectomy. That's major surgery, Desmond, with major risks," she explained, shaking her head slightly. "Unfortunately, we're not set up for that kind of operation here. And I'm not trained for something like that, even on a female!"

"Then we'll go somewhere else, find a really good surgeon!"

"We can't," answered his father in a flat tone. "The Templars-"

"Right, of course... I forgot." Desmond almost laughed. If there was one silver lining to this mess, it was that for a few brief minutes he had forgotten that there was a global society of megalomaniacs who'd stop at nothing to kill him and his friends. "If I check into a hospital they'll be all over us in seconds, won't they... Not to mention trying to explain it to the doctors."

"HQ had a decent surgical wing, before the Geier situation threw a wrench in everything and we had to abandon the place," the medic said, referring to the Assassin who had revealed the location of their headquarters under torture. "So that option's out, of course. And I'm pretty sure you're too far along to medically induce an abortion. Even if that weren't the case..." She sighed. "Well, you said it yourself, your 'equipment' hasn't changed. Meaning there would be no way for it to exit your body."

"Then what are we gonna do?" he whined.

Stacey put a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry, Desmond, but it looks like the only option is for it to stay inside you. For now, at least."


	4. Movement

January 23, 2013

Desmond felt bilge rising in his throat as he ascended the tower during climbing practice. _How can I be having morning sickness? It's like three thirty in the afternoon!_ He shook his head, defiantly swallowing back the nausea. _No no **no!** This is **not** fucking morning sickness, because I'm not fucking pregnant, because I'm a fucking **man** and men don't get fucking pregnant! That stupid Stacey bitch doesn't know what she's talking about, she's not even really a real doctor, she obviously made a mistake._

He finally clawed his way up to the top and dropped into a crouch on the overhang, the familiar position soothing him a little.

"Took you long enough!" shouted Shaun from the ground. "I swear I got up there faster than you this time!"

Desmond glared down at the historian from his viewpoint and opened his mouth to say "Fuck you" but _shit shit shit I shouldn't have looked down_ he was struck by a wave of vertigo _what the fuck, vertigo, I never got vertigo from being high up before_ and his senses were reeling and the landscape was spinning and his foot slipped and he barely managed to hold on to the wooden beam supporting him.

"Come on!" Rebecca's voice from behind startled him, and he almost fell again. "Just do your Leap of Faith already, or did you forget how?"

"Shut up, I- blauggh!" Desmond lurched forward on the beam as lunch escaped the confines of his stomach and esophagus, sprinkling down on the haystack below.

"Geez, you okay there, bud?"

"Leave me alone! I'm fine!"

"Pah, sure, I throw up when I'm fine too."

"Shut **up**!" he repeated. "Just that stupid vegetarian meatloaf you made us eat! That shit is not fit for human consumption!"

"Nobody else had a problem with it," she retorted defensively. "And you had three helpings!"

Desmond emitted a low elongated growl, mostly anger but with a slight undertone of despondency. _Why did I eat so much of it anyway? I... I was just so hungry... It tasted terrible but I couldn't stop eating. Fucking hell. Maybe... maybe I really am... _

* * *

><p>February 7, 2013 <p>

Desmond looked up from his cereal bowl and briefly locked eyes with his father, who had just entered the kitchen.

So far, William, Stacey, and himself were the only ones who knew about... **it**. He tried not to think about how that would inevitably change in the coming months, but failed. He'd seen pregnant women; he knew how huge they got. There was no way he'd be able to hide that from the other Assassins.

And then there was the matter of... the end result. How was the damn thing supposed to be born? Stacey told him she'd devote all her spare time to studying how to do a C-section, but she wasn't sure that his newfound anatomy would even match what was in her books.

What was inside him anyway? Was it even human? Or- since the Apple of Eden had caused it- could it be First Civ? He'd feel really weird if it turned out to be a tiny clone of Juno or Minerva. _Yeah, as if I don't feel weird already._

His father had been treating him differently ever since that day in the infirmary. They'd never spoken much before, but now they never talked at all._ I guess this is pretty weird for him too. Just reunited with his long lost son, who turns out to have a bun in the oven because he touched some glowing ball thing._

"Yo, Earth to Desmond!"

He suddenly realized Rebecca had been talking to him. "Huh?"

"I said, do you wanna come help me test out the new features?"

"Wha?"

"The Animus. I was up all night tweaking the code, adding nifty stuff-"

"No, no way!"

"C'mon, just half an hour, you can handle it!"

"I said no!"

"Okay, okay, I'll get someone else to be my guinea pig."

_I'll let her think I'm still wary of more Bleeding Effects. She can't know the real reason. _Back in Monteriggioni, Lucy had mentioned that the additional DNA from Subject Fifteen's unborn child caused problems in accessing genetic memories. The fact of Desmond's pregnancy might have to come out eventually, but damned if he was going to have Rebecca discover it like that.

* * *

><p>March 2, 2013 <p>

Something fluttered as he was reading Maria Auditore's diary in the library. Hoping against hope that he'd imagined it, Desmond tried to focus on the book.

Not ten minutes later, he felt it again, a small short wave of motion emanating from deep within him. He shuddered. God, that was a weird sensation.

"Are you feeling all right?"

Shaun. Shaun had noticed his reaction.

"Auh... indigestion," Desmond fabricated. "Too much salsa on the tacos last night, I guess."

"Well if you're going to fart, go do it somewhere else."

He didn't dignify that comment with a response.

_It moved, it fucking moved, that means it's alive, it's really alive, there's something alive inside me, inside my uterus, which I shouldn't even have by the way, there's a goddamn parasite in my guts, it's been living off me for months and now it's moving around oh my fucking god!_

This was the train of thought running through Desmond's mind as he sat there. Once he'd judged that a sufficient amount of time had passed so Shaun's suspicions wouldn't be raised- _what the hell is he going to suspect anyway, he doesn't have a clue about what's going on_- he left the library and walked briskly down the corridor- _why am I going to see her, she still can't do anything about it_- to Stacey's office.

"You felt it move. Well... I **would **say that's a normal occurrence at this point in the pregnancy, but nothing about this is really normal, is it?"

"It means I can't deny it anymore," he said, staring helplessly at the unruly swelling. Desmond began to weep angrily. "First I was just a conduit to my ancestors. Now I'm forced to **be** an ancestor! Why can't I just have my own life for once? Why? Why did this happen, Stace?"

Stacey was silent for a moment before responding. "When you touched the Apple... Juno spoke to you, right? Did she say anything about... anything like this?"

"Just your typical cryptic Precursor bullcrap... 'the cross darkens the way', 'your DNA communicates', 'go find the sixth'. Sure as hell didn't mention any plans to use me as an incubator!"

"Your DNA... You think maybe she changed it somehow?"

"You think we could change it back if she did?"

"Ugh, I don't know. That sort of stuff is way outside my field of expertise. Even if we could, I'm pretty sure your uterus wouldn't just disappear."

Desmond bristled at the words 'your uterus'. "It's not **mine**! Just 'cause it's in me..." His keen ears picked up the sound of footsteps approaching. He hunched forward and used the sides of his jacket to minimize his stomach's visibility as Rebecca came in.

"Stace, I brought you some lunch. Oh, hi Desmond, what're you doing here?"

"Nothing. We're just chatting. See you guys later." He left abruptly.

"What's up with him?"

"He's just... dealing with some stuff."

"Like what?"

"You know... stuff."


	5. Twenty-Six

March 7, 2013

"Oi, Desmond! It's almost nine! You going to get your fat arse out of bed and join the rest of us, or have you decided you're already badass enough that you can skip training?"

"Shove it, Shaun," he retorted, not bothering to move from where he lay.

Desmond found himself less and less able to endure physical activity these days. Even just running on the trails, which used to allow his mind to wander free from his troubles, now only jostled the unwanted burden he secretly carried, reminding him how out of control his life was. It taunted him, saying _You're just a puppet, a pawn, a cipher, a tool._

Restless and uncomfortable, he rolled over. A calendar stared back from the opposite wall. His birthday was next week. If he could have one birthday wish, it would be to be free of this rape, for he decided that 'rape' was an apt summation. His body had been used, was **still being used**, against his will, through no fault of his own, and he felt victimized ashamed embarrassed emasculated powerless afraid terrified horrified-

"Son?"

Desmond ignored him.

"Are you... alright?"

What a stupid question. "No," he croaked. "Of course I'm not 'alright'."

"We'll... We'll get through this somehow."

"Ha. Easy for you to say." Desmond turned over again, not wanting to see the way his father looked at him. _He thinks I'm some sort of freak, well it's true, isn't it, I'm a freak, a mutant, a glitch, a fucking **pregnant man**!_

There was quiet. He thought William had left until-

"I think... if we tried using the Apple again-"

"No goddamn way. I'm not going anywhere near that thing. It's screwed up my life enough."

"It might be able to-"

"No, no, **NO!**" he screamed over the rest of the sentence. "Just leave me alone!"

He finally did leave him alone. _Alone, hah, I'm not alone, I can't be alone, there's always the thing, whatever it is, it's always with me, oh shit, it's moving again, stop it, stop it, stop it!_

* * *

><p>March 13, 2013<p>

"...Happy Birthday to Desmond, Happy Birthday to you!"

The gang was all together: Shaun, Rebecca, his dad, Stacey, Colin, and Spencer. These last two Desmond hadn't had a chance to really get to know, being kind of preoccupied with his condition. He kind of remembered seeing Spencer around on the Farm, but they hadn't interacted much. Colin seemed to be a relatively new recruit. The two of them were nearly complete opposites: Spencer was dark and muscular, prone to disagreeing with everyone on everything, while Colin was pale and scrawny, and always affable.

"Well this is from me," Shaun said, handing over a thick book: _A History of the World in 12 Maps_. "Since I noticed you're into reading lately..." Desmond flipped through it, stopping briefly on a glossy page in the middle: some diagram with Arabic script he could halfway understand.

"Looks interesting. Thanks, man." _For all his assholishness, he can be a pretty good guy sometimes._ He felt kind of bad now for telling him to shove it the other day.

"Mine's way more interesting," claimed Rebecca, sliding a small box toward him. "And I took the time to wrap it, too."

"Wrapping paper... useless frivolity," Shaun muttered.

Desmond peeled off the colorful paper. "Holy shit, they make video games now?!" He reread the package just to make sure. "Abstergo Entertainment presents _Liberation_... Fucking hell, Rebecca, you bought this? You gave them money?"

"I wouldn't use the word 'bought' per se..." she answered mischievously, making quote marks in the air. "Let's say I 'liberated' it."

From Colin... a hoodie. Similar to the one he already had, but in extra-large size. He frowned and put it aside without saying anything.

Spencer's gift was next. It turned out to be a twelve-pack of beer. Desmond paused for a beat, then tore it open and started on one of them. Stacey looked at him askance; he met her gaze defiantly as he chugged.

_Fuck what she thinks, I don't care if I mess up its brains or whatever. Hope it fucking dies._

The present from Stacey was revealed as a box of assorted chocolates. Desmond scowled. _What, she thinks I have preggo sugar cravings or something? Stupid._

Shaun apparently had a similar opinion, though his rationale for it was different. "Oh that's just what he needs, more calories!" The medic shot him a dirty look.

That just left William. "I'm afraid I didn't get you anything yet," the man sighed. "Wasn't really sure what you'd want."

"You know what I want." Desmond's words were icy venom. _I want this parasite out of me._

A heavy mood descended upon the party. The four who were still unaware looked at each other, pondering the possible implications of Desmond's statement.

"Uh, okay!" Stacey broke the silence with a tone of obviously forced cheerfulness. "Who's ready for cake?"


	6. Bleeding Effect

Desmond was sick of lying in bed all the time.

Well, no. That wasn't true. More accurately, he had realized that lying in bed led to vicious spirals of despairing thoughts, and he was sick of **those**.

So he threw himself into other activities to occupy his mind. Running and climbing, once his preferred training exercises, were replaced by firearms practice, weightlifting, anything where that motherfucking uterus wouldn't be a factor. He even asked Rebecca to teach him some of how the Animus programming code worked, after reiterating to her, several times, that he was **not** going to get in the thing again anytime soon.

A happy side effect of this was that the other Assassins didn't pester him as much. When he'd been moping around constantly, there were always questions, asked directly of him- _"Why'd you quit the morning runs?" "Have you been crying?"_- or whispered behind his back- _"So he thinks he can just let himself go after what happened in the Temple?" "He's not pulling his weight around here anymore, and that's quite a lot of weight these days!" "Mentor's kid gets special treatment, huh?"_

He still sensed their surreptitious glances at his growing gut, but now he at least gave the appearance of being a productive and normal member of the Brotherhood.

But that all changed one night.

* * *

><p>There was no other word for it. It was torture, plain and simple.<p>

It felt like the Apple's sadistic spawn was clawing its way out of him, but not with mere claws, no it felt more like a blade a drill an ice pick something long and thin and sharp as fuck and it was in his gut and it was headed down, headed for his groin-

Desmond's eyes flew open. His face was clammy with sweat.

_A nightmare, of course it was just a nightmare, of course there wasn't anything drilling outta my dick, but then why does it still hurt, holy shit it**hurts**, did someone kick me in the balls, holy shit did I piss myself?!_

He rolled out of bed and turned to assess the damage. "Ohhh **fuck**."

Even in the meager amount of dim moonlight filtering through the small window, he could tell the difference between urine and blood. Craning his head to see around the belly- Desmond preferred not to acknowledge it as **his** belly if he could avoid it- his eyes confirmed what he'd already felt. A dark crimson was spreading outward through his boxers.

_Oh my god what is happening the pain the blood the pain the blood I need Stacey I gotta get to the infirmary but I'm bleeding I'm bleeding so much and it **hurts hurts hurts**_

Desmond crawled out of his room on all fours, telling himself _come on come on you can deal with a little pain you're a motherfucking Assassin_

He only made it halfway there before collapsing on the floor.

* * *

><p>It was Spencer who found him who knows how long later.<p>

"Jesus Christ, Desmond! Is this your idea of an April Fool's Day prank!?" He nudged the unconscious man with his foot. "Ag... Stacey! You up? We got a situation here!"


	7. No Fooling

April 1, 2013

"Oof," Spencer huffed as he lowered Desmond onto a cot in the infirmary. "Is he going to-"

"Okay, thanks for bringing him, you can go now." Cutting off the man's question, Stacey quickly shooed him out and locked the door.

She turned the patient on his side to take the weight off his back, and had just cut off his boxers to see where the bleeding originated when she heard his drowsy voice.

"Aaaagh... my balls..." Desmond twitched, crossing his legs instinctively.

"Don't do that! Hold still, I need to get some gauze down there."

"Auuh... the blood... what happened?"

"That's what I'm trying to find... oh my god. What is this?"

"Don't ask me! Does it sound like I know?! You're the fucking doctor!" There was a fresh stabbing stinging in his crotch. "Aagh, what the hell are you doing down there?!" he demanded.

"Shh! You want to wake up the whole Compound? Sorry if it stings, I'm just cleaning you up a little, okay? Now calm down and let me try to figure this out."

Suddenly remembering that he was trying to keep this shit a secret, he bit back his words. _Figure this out, figure what out, what happened, what was all that blood, am I going to die, is it killing me, great, that would be just great, super savior Assassin Desmond Miles fucking killed by a stupid fetus that made his balls explode or something-_

"What's all this blood?! Stacey? Why is the door locked?" The shocked voice of Rebecca rang out.

"I'm **busy** in here!" the medic yelled back.

Then Spencer could be heard. "Just found Desmond passed out on the floor down there. It looks like someone stabbed him or something."

"What?! An intruder? But none of the security systems went off-"

"Hello! I am **trying **to concentrate on my **patient**! Go talk somewhere else!" Stacey roared, thumping on the wall to emphasize her command. The discussion abated.

_Aw hell it's not trying to be born, is it? How many months has it been, hah, I don't even have a point of reference there was no fucking conception date that I know of, just the stupid puking in november december january february march it's only been like five or six months but who the hell knows maybe those who came before have shorter pregnancies_

"Um... Desmond?"

_Or maybe the thing is just dead, oh that would be hella awesome if only it didn't hurt so much, no what am I thinking, I'd gladly endure this pain to get rid of it, wait she's saying something_- "Urgh, what."

"You, uh..." He couldn't make out the rest of her sentence.

"You gonna mumble, or you gonna tell me what's going on with my junk?!"

"It looks like you have, uh..."

Now there was another uncomfortable sensation. It sort of felt like a gloved finger going inside him. _Wait, what, going inside where, what the fuck?!_

"... a vagina."

_No goddamn way. _"You got to be kidding me!"

"Okay, a 'birth canal', if you prefer."

Desmond shot her an angry look, though his line of sight was partially blocked. "I would **prefer** not to have any of it! The parasite or any extra parts!" A sudden thought occurred to him. "It **is **extra, right?"

"...You still have your penis and scrotum, if that's what you mean."

_Small comfort._

"This is good, I guess."

"Good? How the hell is this 'good'? I just lost a shit ton of blood and now I'm even more of a mutated freak!"

"I won't have to do a cesarean after all."

_Fucking hell you know what that means, shit, shit, shit, I'll have to squeeze the fucker out myself, out this stupid fucking birth canal, that'll be tons of fun, yeah sounds really 'good', what's next am I gonna grow boobs too?_ Desmond made a long low groaning sound.

"Does it still hurt?"

"I hate my life. And yes, it still fucking hurts."

Heavy footfalls thudded towards them, then someone was banging on the door. "Ms. Russ! What's happened to Desmond?"

She made to get up and let William in, but Desmond grabbed her lab coat, holding her back.

"Don't... I don't want him to see me like this." He sounded about to cry again.

"Okay, uh, let me get you something to wear." She got out a hospital gown and helped him sit up so he could put it on. "Do you feel okay?"

The shift in position put unexpected pressure on the sore spot between Desmond's legs. "Ow! Aaaow. This is definitely not how I would define 'okay'. Agh."

"I mean, are you feeling dizzy or weak at all? You lost a lot of blood. I don't want you fainting again."

"I think I'll manage... to stay conscious..." He winced, then took a deep breath. "I still don't want him in here though."

The banging continued. "Ms. **Russ**!"

"We have to tell them what happened, Desmond. Right now they think some Templar busted in and tried to kill you!"

"Fine," he relented. "But can we just... keep it to my dad right now? Since he already knows... the other thing..."

"I suppose so. For now."

"Thanks," Desmond said wearily, as he laid back down and faced the wall. "And...can I have a blanket?"

She wasn't sure if he wanted it more because he was cold or because he wanted to hide his body, but she brought him one nevertheless, then finally unlocked the door and let William into the infirmary.

The man nearly fell over himself rushing to Desmond's side. "Desmond, son, are you okay? What happened?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

Stacey took the man's arm and led him into her office so they could talk. "He should be fine. The bleeding's stopped and his pain's subsiding."

"Why was he bleeding? Did he lose the-" William stopped abruptly, thinking better of using the word 'baby'.

"No. I thought it was a miscarriage too, but..." Stacey sighed again. She'd been doing a lot of sighing since this whole pregnancy thing started, she realized.

"But what?" It was strange for her to see the great Mentor, who always appeared so confident and decisive, in such a confused and worried state.

"He's grown... a birth canal."

Disturbed by the concept, William's body tensed up slightly.

"Well, I don't know if 'grown' is the best word for it," Stacey thought aloud. "More like, it just opened up in his perineum. There's a lot of nerve endings and blood vessels in that area, so it's no wonder he had so much pain and hemorrhaging." She noticed the old man had collapsed into a chair and was clutching his head. "Are you all right?"

"How could this... he hasn't been near the Apple in **months**..."

"I'm going on the assumption that Juno manipulated his DNA while she had control of his body. There must be some genetic sequence that activates... this process... at a certain point in the gestation period."

William ran a hand through his silver hair. "Speaking of... How long do you think... When is..."

"You're asking about the due date."

A halfhearted nod was the only reply.

"Well, **normally**, it's calculated from the last menstrual period. Desmond never had any of those, of course. But he came into contact with the Apple on October tenth, and if we treat that as date of conception, which would match his report of vomiting in November... Then I'd say sometime mid-July. That is, if we're assuming a **human **gestation length. Don't suppose you have any info on Precursor pregnancy?"

"The thought had occurred to me as well. This could easily be Juno's plan to acquire a physical body again."

"I wouldn't mention that possibility to Desmond. He's freaked out enough as it is."

William was silent for a moment and then changed the subject slightly. "I suppose we have to tell everyone else about his condition now."

"Do we have to? Eventually, yes, they'll have to know, but-"

"Did you not see what it looks like out there? The hall, his room? Like a goddamn crime scene! How else are we going to explain it than by telling the truth, outlandish as it is?"

"Fine. But I think Desmond should be the one to tell them," she asserted. "He needs to be able to have some small amount of control over**something **about this whole situation."


	8. Out of the Bag

William Miles followed the sounds of frantic discussion to the war room. Of course, it had been some time since any attacks were planned there; the Assassins had neither the resources nor the manpower to do much in the way of offense these days. But the military-themed term for their meeting center had stuck, much like how the kitchen had been dubbed the "mess hall".

"... get in, attack, and get out without any of us having a clue?!" Colin was panicky, his usual laid-back demeanor long gone.

"Nobody attacked him," William said as he joined the conversation, avoiding looking directly at any of them.

"What?"

"You're saying... Desmond did that to **himself**?" Spencer's expression was grave. "I know he was kind of depressed or something, but it seemed like he'd gotten over it."

Still not making eye contact, he said, "No, that's not what happened either."

"Well, obviously **something** happened! What if it happens again?!"

"It's because he used the Apple."

"Sorry, come again?"

"Look, it's... a sensitive issue. If you absolutely, positively have to know, then ask Desmond yourself. I can't guarantee he'll tell you, but... Just, take my word for it: it will not happen again."

Shaun snorted as the Mentor left the room. "What rubbish... can't believe he won't just tell us!"

* * *

><p>Stacey jumped out of her seat at the loud <strong>bang<strong> of doors against walls. Shaun had thrown them open with much more force than necessary as he barged into the infirmary.

"Desmond, what the hell happened last night?! And why's it such a bloody sensitive secret!?"

Desmond scowled and turned away.

Rebecca was right behind Shaun, but her words were gentler, full of worry. "You hurt yourself using the Apple of Eden somehow?"

"Why were you even messing around with that thing anyway? I thought it got locked away!"

"I wasn't messing with it! More like it messed with me!"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Shaun shot back.

Desmond didn't respond at first. Stacey was about to tell them to leave, that the man obviously didn't want to talk to them, but then he spoke.

"The First Civ... they're not done with me yet." He struggled to keep his voice from cracking due to emotion. "They're still using me. And I don't even know why this time."

"You're not making any sense! Just tell us what's going on, Desmond!" Rebecca pleaded.

"Promise you won't make fun of me! I never wanted this to happen!"

"Okay, I promise, I won't make fun of you," Rebecca vowed. "Shaun?" she said pointedly.

"I'll **try**, but I can't promise anything."

"Shaun!" She elbowed him in the ribs.

"Fine, fine! I promise I'll try not to make fun!" he said, annoyed.

Still facing the wall, not wanting to see their reactions, Desmond mumbled something.

"Sorry, do we have a bad connection?"

"I'm pregnant," he repeated through gritted teeth.

"Ah-hah, hah. Mind running that by me one more time?"

"You heard me," he cried. "I'm pregnant! Knocked up! Expecting! Incinta!"

Shaun turned to Rebecca. "So... he's finally gone round the bend."

"It's true," came the medic's voice from behind them. They spun around to face her.

"Ah, so you're in on the gag, too, eh? Look, I know 'everything's permitted' but this is basic biology! Unless he's the best damn crossdresser in the history of ever! Men. Do not. Get pregnant."

"And Abstergo doesn't control the world. And DNA doesn't record memories." Stacey spat back at him. "Here's the story, okay? The Apple of Eden gave Desmond a uterus. And there's a fetus in it. And this... what he's just endured... will allow him to deliver it."

"Well..." Rebecca mused. "This would explain a few things. The moodiness, the chubbiness. Avoiding the Animus."

"Faaacking hell." Shaun took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Right, I'm not saying I believe you, but... how long has this alleged pregnancy been going on?"

"Since October ten, we figure. It'll be due in July."

"Do we know what 'it' is?" inquired Rebecca, tilting her head to one side.

"It's a goddamn parasite, that's what it is! Urg! Stop that! Stop it!" Desmond gripped his stomach angrily.

Shaun scoffed. "What, I'm supposed to believe it's kicking now?!"

Desmond suddenly sat up, threw off the blanket, and turned to face the skeptic, straightening his posture to reveal the true shape of things. "You can fucking feel it if you don't believe me," he snarked.

Rebecca hesitantly approached to take him up on that offer. She gently laid one hand on the begowned swelling, which sure as hell looked real. Almost instantly, she detected a flurry of motion. "Holy... shiiit... That is wild." She snapped her head up and met Desmond's eyes, which conveyed a tortured mix of fear, anger, and embarrassment.

"Oh god... " Shaun dropped his glasses in shock and disgust. "You mean it's really... he's really..." All the blood drained from his face as recollections flashed through his mind. The puking. The indigestion. The way Stacey reacted when he drank the beer. "I... I think I need to go take a lie down." He wobbled out of the infirmary.


	9. Cray Indeed

Stacey insisted that he stay in the infirmary for the rest of the day. "Just to be sure that you're out of the woods, so to speak."

"Can I go put some real clothes on at least? I hate this gown thing."

"Sure."

He got to his feet and poked his head into the hall. There was nobody around. _Good._ He scuttled down to his room where he was greeted by-

"Colin!" Desmond yelped. "What are you doing in here?"

"Cleanin' up your mess, D-man. Nice duds, BTW."

Normally Desmond would have laughed at the out-loud usage of an internet acronym, but right now he wasn't in a laughing mood. "Yeah, that's why I'm here, I need to change out of this shit, so scram!"

"Whatever, bro." He strolled away languidly, toting a large garbage bag. Desmond wondered if Rebecca and Shaun had told Colin, or Spencer for that matter, about the pregnancy yet.

His room was an utter horrorshow. The bedsheets had been removed- _so that's what was in the bag_- but the blood had soaked through to the mattress, and had badly stained the carpet as well. He rifled through his drawers to find something that still fit him- _Christ, I'm only five months into this, it's gonna get so huge, hope I don't start needing goddamn maternity clothes_- settling on some slightly worn sweatpants and a green top, neither of which he particularly liked but hell, he was just going to be in the infirmary all day so he didn't really care as long as it wasn't the stupid medical gown.

Next, Desmond stopped by the bathroom to take a leak. Everything seemed to be working the same as before. Experimentally, he reached behind his familiar male genitalia to check out the new terrain, but soon recoiled his hand in disgust._ God, I'm such a freak! Agh, there's still a little blood. Need a fucking sanipad or something. Man, this blows._ He stuffed toilet paper in his underwear and managed to get back to Stacey without further incident.

"While I've got you here, Desmond, I'd like to do an amniocentesis."

"Can I get that in English?"

"It's a procedure to examine DNA from the fluid inside the uterus. So we can find out what exactly you're carrying."

"Oh. Like, if it's even human."_ If it's not, do I really want to know?_

"It might be a little scary; I'll have to use a really big needle to get in there. Would you be okay with that?"

"What, you think **I'm** scared of **needles**? I've experienced being stabbed, shot, nearly hanged, drowning a majillion times because Altaïr never learned to swim-"

"Okay, I get it!"

Nevertheless, he was slightly unnerved at the sight of the syringe plunging into his abdomen.

"Tell me if it starts to hurt."

He looked away. "Ugh... just feels really weird. Like, seriously freaky."

"I bet... Okay, and we're done."

"That was fast."

"Well, I only need a tiny quantity of fluid to run the test. The analysis shouldn't take more than a day or so."

"Speaking of time," Desmond noticed the clock read past ten. "Ya know, I never got any breakfast today."

"Oh, right. You're supposed to be eating for two."

"Fucking hell." He shuddered. "Please don't use that phrase."

* * *

><p>Stacey accompanied him to the kitchen despite his protestations that he was "perfectly fine! I don't need an escort! I'm still an Assassin, not some delicate fucking Ming vase!"<p>

"Better safe than sorry, okay?"

Just his luck, they ran into Colin again in the kitchen, his plate loaded with sliced cucumbers and cottage cheese.

"Oh hey, you two. Is it my imagination or do I detect a blossoming D/S relationship?"

Stacey scrunched her face at the question. "Mr. Miles is my **patient**, and I'm monitoring his recovery from some trauma right now."

"Yeah, about that." The lanky young man paused to take a bite. While he chewed, Desmond went to the fridge to find something for his own hunger. "Would you deign to disclose the deets of that trauma, D-man?"

So nobody told him yet. Desmond settled on a wodge of meatloaf left over from a couple nights ago. He popped it in the microwave for half a minute while pondering how to reply to the query.

He started off vaguely. "Uh, do you know that stuff in Italy?"

"I know a lotta stuff about Italy."

"I mean, what happened to me there. In October. With... with the Apple." He sat down, avoiding the chairs closest to Colin.

"I've read the files. Shit got cray."

_Files, there's files on me, of course there's files, just like Shaun's database entries, why am I not surprised_. "Yeah... we think Juno uh, changed my DNA or something."

"Hmm. To what end?"

"To..." _Christ, I might as well just get it over with._ "...reproductive ends. If you get my drift." He indicated his enlarged midriff.

"Hmm." Colin's gaze conspicuously followed the gesture. "I see." He chuckled. "Good one. No, but seriously, what really happened?"

"I know it's hard to believe, but that** is** what really happened," Stacey confirmed.

"Really." He rubbed his almost nonexistent chin stubble. "Cray indeed. So you have seahorse genes now?"

"What?" He was accustomed to Colin saying odd things, but they usually made at least some minute amount of sense.

"In seahorses, the female doesn't carry the eggs herself but deposits 'em into the male."

"That's uh, interesting." _Christ, I hope I'm not carrying eggs. Well actually, eggs might be easier to...uggh, give birth to... like, a more streamlined shape... Wait, what am I thinking? Don't be stupid, eggs wouldn't be able to fucking kick._

"Did you know the scientific term for 'seahorse' is 'hippocampus'? The same word's also used for the part of the brain that encodes memories. Some Italian medical guy back in the day thought they looked similar."

"Memories, huh? Ironic."

"That's not irony."

"Whatever." He finished the last of the meatloaf and stood up to leave with Stacey. "If you see the others, tell 'em I've been put on mandatory bed rest for the rest of today."

* * *

><p>Desmond was playing Liberation to pass the time. He'd just been killed by an alligator, <strong>again<strong>, when Spencer came to visit him.

"Ag, man, can't you just unscrew the lid on the salt shaker like a normal person?"

"Huh?"

"Don't 'huh' me, I'm talking about this whole 'April Fool's I'm pregnant even though I'm a dude' thing. Who's the father supposed to be? I didn't even know you were gay."

"Fuck off, I am not **gay**!" Desmond tossed the PS Vita aside. "And I'm not joking, either. Hell, I **wish** it was all a joke. Agh." His insides were roiling with motion again. "There it goes, like it knows we're talking about it!"

Any lingering doubt Spencer had was displaced at the sight of Desmond's uncomfortable squirming. "Okay, okay... How exactly did this happen?"

He was tired of explaining it. "The Apple and Juno and some shit! And fuck if I know the father, or mother, or whatever!"

"Ag, you don't need to get all pissy at me for asking." Spencer paused and then changed the subject. "Is that game any good?"

"It's okay... You play an Assassin, actually."

"What the hell, seriously?"

"Yeah, it's surreal. They must have took some subject's Animus sessions and decided they could monetize it as a game."

"And they've put this out publicly. Don't they want to deny that Assassins and Templars even exist?"

"Well they've put it out as fiction, obviously. It even says 'work of fiction' every time you boot it up." It was nice to talk about something else besides the parasite for once.


	10. Impassioned Heart

April 15, 2013

The results from the ammo-whatever had come in. "The fetus is human, male, and I didn't detect any abnormalities."

"Except for, you know, the whole fact that it's inside me. Inside a **man**. That's kind of abnormal."

"Okay, except for that part," Stacey admitted.

Desmond thought for a few moments, then asked, "Does that test show... Can you tell who the, uh..."

"One of the parents is you. As for the other one..." She shrugged.

"Aaagh! I don't want to be a parent!" he suddenly snapped. "I hate this! Hate it, hate it, hate it!" He banged his fists on it to emphasize the loathing he felt. "Are you **sure** you can't get rid of it?"

"Stop hitting yourself, Desmond! Yes, I'm sure! You could die if the operation doesn't go right!"

"I'd rather die!"

"Don't say that!"

"Don't tell me what not to say! Don't try to be the Templar of my emotions!"

Stacey didn't respond to that, deciding it might be best to let him ride out the mood swing without interfering. She went to her desk, got out her trusty book of crossword puzzles, and tried to ignore her patient's furious outbursts.

"Goddamnit! What am I gonna do!? A baby, a motherfucking **baby**?! Hah, that's a laugh! I'm the mother, and nobody fucked me! Shit, I'm supposed to be an Assassin or a bartender, not an incubator or a babysitter! And I still don't know why this is even happening! Yeah, the Apple caused it to happen, but what's the **purpose**, goddamnit! What's it all for?! Am I just a test subject again, Juno's test subject!?"

Over the next half hour, Desmond's temper gradually progressed from a raging fire of constant vitriol, to a low simmer of grumbled complaints, then to a quiet and sustained sobbing. When Rebecca came to have her customary lunch with Stacey, she found him asleep with an intense scowl on his face.

"Aw, how precious... the lil' guy tired himself out with all that angstiness."

* * *

><p>The next day, he returned to the firing range. "Are you sure you want to be out here?" Spencer asked as Desmond loaded his rifle.<p>

"Yes, **Mom**, I'm sure! I'm not going to let this stupid thing stop me from keeping up my skills. What, you think I'm gonna accidentally shoot myself in the uterus?" If there was any reply, he didn't hear it after putting on the earmuffs.

* * *

><p>April 20, 2013<p>

"Bill, what's the hold up? It's obvious Desmond doesn't want to keep the blasted thing, so why hasn't it been dealt with yet?"

"Our hands are tied, Mr. Hastings. Have been from the start."

"Have been?" Shaun blinked and adjusted his glasses. "What, you mean to tell me you've already known he was up the duff?"

"Yes, I've known since January. That's when Ms. Russ discovered... the situation." William sighed quietly. "But even then, any termination attempt would have been too hazardous. Surgery of that sort can't be done here, and moving Desmond to another location was out of the question. You know full well how intensely the Order was searching for us after our shenanigans in December. It's a miracle we got to this location safely. We couldn't risk leaving."

"But... but... don't they have a pill or something that can take care of these things?" Shaun sputtered.

"Not when 'these things' are three months along," William hissed. "And furthermore, at that point Desmond didn't have..." His face twisted awkwardly as he paused for a moment. "He didn't have any sort of, ah... outlet, through which 'these things' might be passed if they were 'taken care of' through medicinal means."

"Well then what about bloody **magical** means? The Apple got him like that, right? Can't it be undone the same way?"

"I did suggest that. Desmond wouldn't even consider attempting it."

"**Make** him attempt it, then!"

"He didn't want to," William stated bluntly through a frown. "And I'm not going to force him. Besides, we can't be sure that the Apple wouldn't just escalate the situation by mutating him some other way."

"Oh, so we're just going to resign ourselves to having some sort of dodgy Juno-spawn running round the place."

"We've confirmed it's a normal human."

"Ah, yes, 'normal', that's the perfect word to describe this!" Shaun stormed out of the office.

* * *

><p>Washing his body was annoying. The shower spray relentlessly drumming against that swollen convexity made it impossible to ignore. At times there would come small poundings from inside of him as well. The two sensations combined were doubly unsettling.<p>

When Desmond got back to his room after showering, he found a book on his bed, which they'd never quite managed to get all the blood stains out of. They couldn't just throw out the mattress and buy a new one; Waste Management tended not to send any garbage trucks around to secret locations of Assassin dens.

Anyway, the book was a ridiculous pink and blue affair with _Pregnancy 101_ in idiotic stencil letters on the cover. _Whose idea of a joke is this?_ he thought as he picked it up, holding it at arms' length as if it was contagious. A scrap of paper fell out from the slightly worn pages.

_Desmond,_

_A friend of ours got this book for your mother before you were born. You might find it useful._

The note wasn't signed, but he recognized the handwriting. "Geez, Dad. Hell of a belated birthday present."

The words "your mother" reminded him of a painful fact. His mother was dead, having succumbed to cancer a couple years after the Farm had been razed in Abstergo's "Great Purge". He started to cry again.

* * *

><p>May 6, 2013<p>

Things seemed a tiny bit less stressful now that everyone knew about it. For one thing, Desmond didn't have to try to hide the bulge anymore. _Well, 'bulge' is kind of an understatement now. It's more like a giant orb._ He doubted whether he'd have been able to hide it at this point, anyway. The growth had accelerated in the past couple of weeks, and the shape had become unmistakably that of a pregnancy, rather than a potbelly. He could no longer get any of his pants up to his waist, and had to settle for wearing them down low on his hips like those douchey gangsta wannabes he always hated serving back in New York.

As he was tying his shoes- a rather difficult task these days- there was a sharp rapping on his door. "Yo, Uterus Dude!"

"Coliiiinnn! Don't fucking call me that!"

"Would you prefer 'Juno's Bitch'?"

"I can still kick your skinny ass, even like this, you know!"

"Whatever." Desmond could hear the shrug in the younger Assassin's voice. "Aaaanyway, the commander wants everyone in the war room for a sitrep."


	11. Preparation

Desmond took a seat between Shaun and Rebecca at the long meeting table formed from birch planks.

"Okay, now we're all here, so what's this about, Bill?" Spencer sounded a bit irritated.

"The first order of business is him." The Mentor waved a hand toward his son. "By now you're all familiar with the situation." He paused a moment to see if anyone would disagree. They did not. "Today is May sixth: approximately thirty weeks into the gestation period. I'm advised by Ms. Russ that the usual length is forty weeks. That makes D-Day July seventeenth."

Desmond rolled his eyes at that. _D-Day, geez, everything's gotta be all military, every single thing._

"Give or take a week or so," appended Stacey. "Even normal pregnancies are unpredictable."

"Desmond. Have you gone over the material I provided?" William asked.

"If you mean that stupid book, then no."

"Look, I gave you that so you can be prepared! Preparation is a fundamental step in any mission."

"Since when did this become a mission?"

"Just read the damn book, Desmond!" Shaun groaned. "I thought you liked reading now!"

"I don't want to read about **this**!" He gestured angrily at the belly.

"If you don't read it, it's your own loss," his father said, frowning. He then pointed to Spencer and Colin. "Mr. Vermaak and Mr. McCorquodale are in charge of constructing," here his cadence faltered; he seemed to have difficulty saying the next words, "constructing ...a crib."

Spencer looked sideways at Colin. He was clearly less than thrilled at the assignment.

"The kid'll need clothes and stuff too," Rebecca added.

"Yes, I've already sent out a notice to Tom." Since going out on shopping trips ran a high chance of exposing their location, Tom was the Assassins' point of contact anytime they needed supplies. Desmond knew very little about the man. He never came to the Compound himself, but somehow, crates of stuff they requested would arrive in prearranged dead drop locations throughout the Vermont forest. "And before you ask: no, I did not disclose to him who exactly was expecting."

"Now, on to other matters," William said, and looked to Shaun. "Mr. Hastings, you remember our discussion regarding Abstergo Entertainment? I've spoken to our people in Montreal and they agree it's feasible. You'll be going there in August."

"Wait, hold up, Shaun's going to infiltrate Abstergo?" Desmond asked. "If I recall, the last time you sent someone there, it didn't turn out so hot."

"This is different. I'm not going as a test subject. I'm going as an employee."

"Won't they recognize you from, you know, the time they **kidnapped you**?" Rebecca asked.

"That's what I said!" Spencer glared at William. "I'm telling you, this is a bad idea, Bill."

"And I told you, Entertainment is almost a completely separate entity; most of them don't even know who they're really working for. They won't recognize him."

"I've done undercover missions before, I know how to stay off the radar. But I'll dye my hair or something as a disguise if it'll make you lot worry less," Shaun said, rolling his eyes.

"At any rate," continued William, "embedding Shaun is only the first phase of the plan."

"What's the whole plan, then?"

"Word is the Order is onto some big things in that division. Things we need to know more about. Montreal has their eyes on a couple of insiders that might be willing to turn traitor. But we can't let them know too much too soon."

_He's not answering the question... How can he talk so much while saying so little?_ Desmond zoned out, and didn't hear the rest of the spiel. His mind returned to his own situation. _They're building a crib. They're getting baby clothes. It's really happening. I'm gonna have a kid. A kid that has to live with us... meaning we have to take care of it... for years and years and years..._ Overwhelmed by this prospect, he laid his head down on the table.

Rebecca poked him. "You okay there, bud?"

"Bluh."

"What's that supposed to mean?" she whispered.

"Can't deal with this."

"We **have** to deal with it. There's no other option."

"Bluuuh."

"Problem, Desmond? If you're feeling unwell, you can be excused," Stacey told him.

He wasn't feeling any worse than usual, aside from needing to pee, but he took the opportunity anyway and left.

* * *

><p>Having nothing better to do after visiting the toilet, Desmond plopped himself on his bed and started on the assigned reading. The inside title page had a message scrawled in pen, which began<p>

_Janet and Bill: So you two are finally joining the Parenthood! Congrats!_

Feeling grief creeping up again, he hastily flipped away from that page, to the introduction:

_If you are reading this, chances are you're expecting a little bundle of joy! Congratulations! This  
><em>_can be the most exhilarating time in a woman's life, but many mothers-to-be have questions or  
>worries about what lies ahead. We've designed this book to answer those questions and ease<br>those worries. No matter your situation, you'll find the information you need in Pregnancy 101!_

"Like fuck I will. Pretty sure they don't have anything on **my** situation." He flipped to the index. Of course there was no entry on "male pregnancy". But there was one on "men", with a subentry "at birth". His curiosity piqued, Desmond went to the page indicated.

_Not that long ago, fathers were barred from the delivery room altogether. The only man present  
>would be the doctor. But in these more enlightened times, things have changed. Many dads-to-be<br>are eager to be there for their wives during childbirth. Some even want to catch the baby themselves._

_"Catch the baby"?_ The expression was unfamiliar. His mind conjured up the image of a screaming newborn in a catcher's mitt.

_However, other men are uncomfortable seeing their loved one experiencing the pains of labor, even_  
><em>if those pains are the culmination of their ultimate expression of love. Be sure to ask your hubby how<em>  
><em>he feels about it, and well before your due date!<em>

"Yeah sure I'll ask my 'hubby'," he said sarcastically. "Oh wait, I forgot, I don't have one! Derrr!" He flipped to another page at random.

_Your cervix, which is tightly closed while baby develops, will begin to open as your womb contracts. Your __doctor  
>will gauge the progress of your labor by measuring the size of this opening. This measurement <em>_is called  
>"dilation". When you are ten centimeters dilated, you are ready to push your little one out into <em>_the big world!_

* * *

><p>Desmond poked his head into the supply room. "Hey, Col?"<p>

Colin looked up from Practical Furniture Design. "Hm?"

"Can I borrow a ruler? Or a tape measure?"

"Checking just exactly how big you've gotten, eh?" He opened a drawer and passed a tape measure to the pregnant man.

"Yeah, sure." _No, not really. _I'm sure as fuck not going to tell **him** about the cervix thing though.__

"I think I'll go with a convertible crib."

"What?"

Colin held up the book and pointed to a diagram. "See? Converts into a kid bed once the little guy's outgrown the crib stage. Handy, right? Then we're not building a whole new bed from scratch down the line."

"Yeah... good thinking." Desmond sensed a long talk about crib specifications coming on, and he did **not** want to get drawn into that. "See you 'round."

"You're the one that's round."

Desmond actually smiled at that one as he walked away. He eyed the tape measure. _Ten centimeters... four inches... that doesn't sound too bad, actually._ He'd originally imagined it being closer to ten inches, which had freaked him out quite a bit.

"Hey, just who I was looking for." He looked up and saw Stacey. She looked down and saw him fingering the tape. "You been measuring yourself?"

"No. I was... just checking something, is all."

"Well, I need to check you, how's that for a coincidence? Come on." She gestured for him to follow her.

"Maybe I should just move into the infirmary permanently, save all the hassle," he joked, surprised that he didn't feel more annoyed at her request.

"You seem to be handling things a lot better these days."

"Yeah, I, uh..." He sat down on the familiar cot and removed his shirt as usual. "I guess I've got used to it by now. Like how I got used to all the Assassin stuff eventually..." Stacey was taking his blood pressure. "I mean, don't get me wrong, this is still super weird, and I still wish it wasn't happening! But the whole situation just feels ridiculously silly now, instead of feeling like some horrific nightmare."

"Well, if you need to talk or something, I'm always available, okay?" She donned a stethoscope and listened to his heart, his lungs, and finally... the uterus. "Have you been eating right? Plenty of fruit, vegetables, dairy?"

"Not particularly," Desmond had to admit.

"Well, you should try to. Raising this guy will be hard enough already without him having some nutritional deficiency... You're still feeling movements, right?"

"Yeah. It still creeps me out every time." _"This guy"... there's actually a little dude in there, inside my guts. Insane. Fucking insane._

"They'll probably decrease as you get closer to term."

"How much bigger do you think it'll get?" Not very much, I hope. It's already like a basketball... a really heavy basketball.

"Can't really say. Every pregnancy is different, and of course this one is extra different." Stacey set aside the stethoscope and put on a pair of gloves. "Okay, I know you won't like this, but I need to do an internal exam."

He made a face of disgust. "Gaagh, do you really have to?" _I'd almost forgotten I had... that._

"I've got to make sure the canal is in decent shape for the delivery. Don't want it to heal closed before then, right?"

"Can't you just ask me whether it's closed or not, and take my word for it?"

"Sorry. This is something else you'll have to get used to. Just lie back and think of England. Or Italy, if you prefer."


	12. Chimera

May 8, 2013

"So this chunk of code here takes the signals from the efferent nerves and reformats it to translate that signal into an action within the memory. Very important that it gets properly formatted, obviously."

"Uh-huh." Desmond was hardly able to process what she was saying, partly because his stupid stretched-out skin was itching like hell and distracting him, and partly because he was thinking about something he would need her help with. If he was even sure he really wanted to do it.

"The idiots who wrote Abstergo's code were incredibly inefficient with this part. Baby's efferent action module is tons more streamlined, uses a lot less CPU, so there's way, **way** less overheating."

_Shaun was the only guy there when I touched the Apple. It'd be so fucking weird if it was him. But who says it has to be another guy? Maybe Juno took something from Rebecca... or Lucy... Or maybe it's none of them at all. Maybe it's nobody, really; just randomly generated DNA outta nowhere. Hell, that would make as much sense as anything else!_

"Then there's the afferent system, which is obviously a lot more complex, 'cuz it's gotta encode and express all of the sensory data. It's several different code modules: you got your tactile, your auditory-"

"Rebecca, I want to know who."

"Want to know what now?" She turned her attention from the screen, her string of jargon jarred to a stop by his sudden declaration.

"Stacey did a test. It said half of it is me. But..." He rubbed his arm nervously. "I think, I kinda wanna know... who the other half is."

"Ohh. You mean the father. Uh, other father. Mother?"

"Let's say 'ancestor.' You can find it out... if I go in, right?" He pointed toward the Animus, as if there was any need to specify what he meant. "Like with Subject Fifteen."

"Animus as paternity test. Huh." Rebecca pondered the suggestion for a bit. "Not exactly what it's designed for, but I suppose it could work... All right. Go ahead and hop in."

He did so. "Hey, look. I still fit just fine! It never needed any widening after all!"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"...Never mind."

"Gimme your arm, I gotta plug in the input."

He consciously made the effort not to cry out at the sharp pinprick this time. _"What are you, a tiny child?"_ He smiled inwardly upon remembering Shaun's particular choice of insult, which was oddly ironic in the current situation.

"Well, it's not recognizing you, so your DNA definitely changed... I'm getting a bunch of errors here, of course. Bear with me."

There was a clattering of keys being pressed, and then he was back in the familiar white loading area. He called out into the void. "How come you didn't get errors when I was reliving Haytham and Connor? I've been... you know... since before then."

"Now **that** is a good question. Maybe your genes... I dunno, just changed really gradually over the months, not all at once right when you first touched the Apple?"

He heard a couple of beeps, and the sound of more typing. A sickening possibility occurred to Desmond. "Uh, is there any way that me being in the Animus could, like, mess him up?" He was startled to realize that he'd now begun to use the pronoun "him" rather than "it".

"I'm ninety-nine percent sure it won't. He'll just chill out as usual while you explore the past," Rebecca answered. "Baby only interfaces with your nervous system, not the kid's."

"Then how's it gonna read his genetic memories?"

"Microchimerism. It's this thing that happens to pregnant women- and apparently pregnant **men**, too- where fetal cells move in on the maternal side. Remember, the genetic memories are in the DNA, not the brain."

"So I have **two** DNAs?"

"Pretty much, yeah. Says here 'Input has detected multiple genomes'. Now we just gotta figure out which is you and which is Junior. Eenie, meenie, minie... moe!"

Desmond felt the familiar mental jolt of being thrown into someone he'd never synced before. He was suddenly dashing across rooftops, performing those well-practiced motions that uninitiated onlookers sometimes described as "una danza del diavolo" but which he knew as "freerunning".

_Fuck yes! I almost forgot how awesome it feels to move like an Assassin._ He threw himself into the action wholeheartedly, not even caring who or where or when this was. The ancestor turned his head back and Desmond caught a momentary glance of someone chasing him. Then he swiftly maneuvered down into a narrow alley and continued running at ground level, mud splashing with every step as he zigzagged at random through more alleyways to throw off his pursuer, before finally ducking into a small shed and hiding himself between pillars of stacked crates.

His heart pounded in his ears for a tense minute. In the dim light, Desmond could distinguish labels on some of the crates: "Guanti", "Scarpe", "Frammenti".

"Hey, what are you doing in here again?"

"Mi dispiace, signor Moretti," the ancestor said, addressing the burly man who had just entered the building. "I was being chased-"

"That's your own problem, Carlo! Don't drag me into it! I have chosen an **honest** line of business, and when you use my storeroom as a hiding spot, you risk **ruining** everything I've worked for!" He drew closer and grasped the younger man's shoulders, shaking him as he spoke. "If they find you here, I'll be implicated in whatever shady dealings you're involved with! How many times must I explain this before your feeble mind grasps the concept?"

"I..." He seemed fairly intimidated by this Signor Moretti, and couldn't manage a reply.

"Lord, just look at the mess you've made," he sighed, finally releasing him. "Clean up all this mud, and then get out of here. And do it quickly, got it?"

Carlo managed to wipe up the floor surprisingly fast. Gee, maybe I'll get some of his mad cleaning skills from this memory, Desmond thought idly.

The sun had set now, and he scuttled out into the deep darkness of the night. _So, this guy's the other parent. How the hell did that happen? Was he somewhere near that church on the night of October 10? I suppose we'll never know. Ones Who Came Before work in fuckin' mysterious ways. At least it's not Shaun. _Desmond exited out from the memory.

As the Animus interface melted away and was replaced by Rebecca's cluttered workroom, he saw she was giving him a quizzical look. "Why'd you exit?"

"Mission accomplished. It was some random Italian dude named Carlo."

"Hello, earth to Desmond? Didn't you notice what year that was? Carlo's not your baby daddy, unless he lived to be five hundred something years old!"

He ignored her grating usage of "baby daddy" for now. "If that wasn't the guy, why did you put me in that memory, then?"

"God, you of all people should know this!" Rebecca sounded both annoyed and amused. "It's **almost never** possible to just jump right into the exact memory you want! Most of them are, like, locked up, and you can't see 'em until you sync through a buncha other ones!"

Desmond facepalmed. _Derrr! Just like Vidic trying to get Altaïr's map. Or us, trying to get Ezio's Apple and Connor's key._

"I couldn't get into Junior's most recent ancestor, so I scanned back through the pathways until I found one that was accessible. Which happened to be in the sixteenth century."

"Fuck. You mean I'd have to relive **five hundred years** of memories to find out whose kid this is?"

Rebecca tapped a command, bringing up a screen with the header "Ancestral Pathway Overview". "I'm showing sixteen generations between Carlo and the present day. You probably wouldn't have to hit every one of those, and you **definitely** wouldn't have to sync their whole lives, but it'd still be a lot to slog through."

"Well... it's not as if I have anything better to do these days. It'd be hella more interesting then just sitting around and **gestating**." Desmond infused the last word with unmistakable revulsion.

"You sure you want to? You're talking about some serious Animus time."

"I'll be fine," he replied tersely. "You said yourself my tolerance is increased after that stuff with Clay."

"Yeah, but... this might affect you differently. Since these aren't your own memories. We don't have data on this type of thing."

"Ello 'ello? Back in the Animus, are we?"

Rebecca looked up and Desmond turned his head to see Shaun.

"Thought you didn't want anything to do with that gizmo anymore."

"I'm allowed to change my mind, aren't I?"

"He's on a mission to find out whose this is," Rebecca informed him, pointing at Desmond's belly.

"Huh." Shaun didn't manage to close his mouth after this syllable. He just stood there staring at where her finger indicated.

When it became apparent that Shaun wasn't going to add anything else to the conversation, Desmond resumed his dialogue with Rebecca. "Okay, so there's no data on this. Well, here's a chance to **get** some data on it! Look, you can always boot me outta there if there's any trouble!"

"You're really jonesing **that much** to find out Junior's other half?"

"Well," Desmond hesitated momentarily. That had originally been his only purpose. But now, after this memory of Carlo... "That, and... I guess you could call it escapism. I can experience having a normal body again... experience travelling faster than two miles an hour... experience not being stared at by some British jackass! God, take a picture Shaun, it'll last longer!"

"Ah," Shaun shook himself back to life from his frozen stupor. "Sorry. It's just so bizarre."

"Thanks, Captain Obvious."

"Right, then." Rebecca said, suddenly upbeat. "Let's get back to Carlo. I'll keep an eye on the ancestral pathways as you increase your synch, and I'll let you know the minute the next branch of his family tree opens up."

Now it was Desmond who looked quizzical. "What happened to all that concern from a moment ago?"

"Oh, I wasn't all that concerned. Just, if something bad happened later I didn't want you to freak out and say that I **forced** you back in the Animus."

"You crafty fox."

"Guilty as charged."


	13. Familiarization

So Desmond got to know Carlo some more. It turned out that he was a low-ranking member of the Bologna thieves guild. It felt a little odd to relive someone who wasn't an Assassin, but at the same time, it was a nice change of pace. Instead of stabbing targets, he only stole from them.

Just when he was really getting into it, Rebecca said he had to take a break. "Your dad has a strict three-hour maximum on Animus sessions."

"Three hours! That's nothing! I've stayed in for days-"

"You stayed in for days when we had no other choice 'cause the sun was gonna explode. This is different. You're just in there for funsies now. Hey, guess who Carlo's dad is." She changed topics abruptly.

Desmond sat up from the Animus, a bit disoriented by having to readjust from the thief's thin frame to his own seven-month pregnant form. "Why were you looking at his dad? We're trying to go forward in time, Becca, not backward."

"Remember I said I scanned back through the ancestry? The system recognized a familiar genome. Come on, guess."

"Someone I know?"

"Duh! And you know him pretty damn well, too."

The obviousness of what she was getting at suddenly clicked. "Ezio?" he said, bewildered.

"The one and only," Rebecca confirmed with a grin.

Desmond let out a short chuckle. "Fuckin' Ezio. Literally!" He chuckled again at the unintended pun. "Man, the way he went at it, he prolly had a **hundred** kids he never knew about! Half the modern population of Europe's related to him I bet!"

* * *

><p>May 14, 2013<p>

After today's Animus session, Rebecca happily informed him that another, more recent ancestor could now be accessed. "You've been in there long enough for today, so we'll start on Anton tomorrow."

As he laid in bed that night, Desmond realized he was actually going to miss Carlo Poletti. He'd begun to sympathize with the young man struggling to make his way on the mean streets of Bologna. Moving on to someone else felt like having to return a really good book to the library when you'd only read it halfway because its due date had come.

Due date... Thinking those words reminded him of the reason he was back in the Animus at all. Desmond tried to picture himself as a father, and soon realized that he didn't have any good role models to follow in that regard.

_My dad is mostly crap. I never met Altaïr's dad. Al Mualim was his father figure and he was total crap. Ezio's dad seemed pretty cool, from the brief time I experienced before..._ He shut his eyes tight, feeling tears well up. Of all the bad memories he'd seen, that was always the one that stuck with him the most. _It didn't used to make me cry, though! These goddamn hormones!_ He tried to banish it from his mind by quickly thinking of something else. _Clay's dad was mostly crap. Connor's dad was a fucking Templar. At least I won't be that._

* * *

><p>May 16, 2013 <p>

"Yo, Mr. Mom!" Colin called out. "Time to get outta there. Doc wants you for another checkup."

Desmond got out of the Animus as fast as he could. He was glad to leave 1618 Austria for 2013 Vermont. Anton Schreiber was by far the most boring person he'd ever relived. He wasn't an Assassin, a thief, or anything exciting, not even a Templar. Most of the memories consisted of the man poring over different translations of the Bible and comparing them to each other. Anton and his colleagues all seemed to think this was a very important task for some reason Desmond couldn't comprehend. Even the prospect of another internal exam was more appealing than spending another minute staring at scripture. 

* * *

><p>While Stacey was examining his stomach, there was a sharp kick. "Woah," she said.<p>

"You felt it too, huh?"

"Yeah... Have you thought about what you want to name him?"

That caught him off guard. "Agh. I don't want to name him, really." In his mind, what he was carrying was still an amorphous concept, barely a person at all. He'd only recently gotten past calling it a parasite. Choosing a name would make it his child. His **son**. Thinking of himself as a father was difficult, but somehow, thinking of the thing inside him as his son was even harder. _Not that I never wanted to have kids at some point in my life... but I sure as hell never wanted one coming outta my own body, and while I'm trying to be an Assassin._

"Well, he's not going to name himself."

Desmond wasn't sure how to respond, so he just didn't.

Stacey sensed that he was uncomfortable with the subject, so she changed topics. "What's happening in the Animus lately?"

"Well, the Austrian to English translation module Rebecca threw together isn't very good, so I can't hardly tell what's going on most of the time. Some religious shit. I don't even care, really. Can't wait to get out of this guy."

"Hm." She was writing something in Desmond's chart.

"Hey, what all's in that file you have on me?"

"Pretty much everything."

"Everything?"

"Everything medical." She flipped through the ream of paper. "Birth record, childhood vaccination log, height and weight charts. Then of course we have a nine year gap, then a copy of Abstergo's reports, then there's a bunch of brain scans... and here's those weird labs from January, and the amnio results." She held the whole thing up. It was a rather hefty folder, and it sagged under its own weight. "Do you want to read it?"

"No thanks." He shook his head. "Sounds like you know my whole life story, then."

"Most Assassins do, probably. I mean, you are the legendary Desmond Miles."

"Oh, man... Please don't tell me the whole Brotherhood is aware of this latest development."

Now it was Stacey's turn to shake her head. "Only the seven of us know you're pregnant."

"Good. Let's keep that on a need-to-know basis." Desmond crossed his arms. "Enough about me. We always talk about me. I don't know anything about you."

"Let's finish your exam first, okay?" The medic drew some blood, then weighed him and measured his belly from top to bottom. "Everything seems okay... I think we can skip the internal exam; your canal seemed to be stable at the last three checks so I don't think it's likely to close up anymore."

"I never thought I'd be this happy to hear a girl say she **wasn't** gonna check out my crotch," Desmond quipped as he put his shirt back on. _If it gets much bigger, my shirts won't fit anymore._

"Have you been drinking anymore?" She raised an eyebrow.

"No, unless you count Carlo getting wasted on some cheap-ass wine."

"Good. Keep it that way." She closed the chart. "Right. Okay, you were going to ask about me?"

"Yeah. Let's start with how you got to be in the Assassins."

She considered her response carefully before answering. "Long story short, I wanted to be a doctor, but that was too expensive, so I joined the Air Force's medical training program but they kicked me out." She sighed. "After that, I couldn't go back home... But somehow, during the ensuing mess I managed to find a place where everything was permitted... and they were more than willing to have me."

"Why'd they kick you out? Why couldn't you go back home?"

Stacey looked at him for several seconds, her face more serious than usual. "...Maybe I'll tell you someday. But not today. I'm sorry."


	14. Turbulent Times

May 21, 2013

Desmond poked at the bowl of cream of wheat. _This stuff is so bland..._ What he really wanted was a normal cereal, Honey Nut Cheerios or Cap'n Crunch or something, but they'd run out of those. He stirred the beige mush and wondered what Stacey's big secret was. _Kicked out of the military... Found a place where everything is permitted... Is she gay? Why wouldn't she just say so?_

Desmond suddenly remembered something from a conversation last month. Spencer's half-joking remark: _"Who's the father? I didn't know you were gay."_ And his own angry reply: _"Fuck off, I am not gay!"_ He cringed a little._ Shit. Stacey overheard that, misinterpreted it, and now she thinks I'm a massive homophobe. Well, right now I am **massive**, but I'm not a homophobe. I don't think they even allow homophobes to join the Brotherhood. Policing peoples' sexuality is more up the Templars' alley. Next time I see her, I gotta-_ "Ugh!"

"I get it, you don't like cream of wheat! Stop complaining!" Spencer said from across the table.

"No, that was an 'I just got kicked in the ribs' ugh, not a 'This food is gross' ugh." Desmond clarified. "Although this food **is** gross."

"Right. Speaking of the kid," Spencer said, "We got the crib all finished."

Desmond "Hmm"ed in acknowledgement, his mouth full.

"So we'll be moving it into your room today."

He quickly swallowed the mouthful. "My room?! So he can wake me up with crying and shit? No thanks."

"Well he's your kid!"

"I didn't ask for this, remember?!"

"That's life! Things happen out of our control sometimes!"

"What, Juno makes me pregnant with some mystery baby and I'm supposed to just say 'Shit happens' and roll with it?!"

"Chill out, you guys!" Rebecca said as she entered the kitchen. "Or at least argue more quietly! I can hear you from all the way over the other side of the Compound."

"He wants to put the baby in my room, Becca!"

"Well, whose room would you put him in?"

That threw Desmond off a bit. _Shit. She's right. Nobody else asked for this either._ "Um... We could build him his own separate room?"

"Yeah, we'll just drop everything and start a massive home improvement project, why not." Spencer rolled his eyes. "Things like that take a lot of resources! Resources that cost money! Which we're kind of short on at the moment! And we don't exactly have a lot of ways to get more! Unless you absorbed some of Ezio's magical money making skills you haven't told us about!"

"Sorry! It was just a suggestion!" Desmond realized he didn't know anything about how the modern Assassins were financed. Obviously the days of looting Templar treasure chests and skimming profits from Brotherhood-backed businesses were long over. It was probably quite a bit more difficult in this age of electronic banking where every fraction of a penny was tracked and every suspicious transaction was investigated.

"Kind of a **stupid** suggestion."

"Cut him a break, Spence. Come on, Desmond, let's go sync with Anton."

"Aw man, do I have to?"

"Of course you don't." Rebecca looked suddenly worried. "Is the Animus starting to affect-"

He waved a hand to dismiss that. "I'm fine with using the Animus. I meant do I have to keep syncing Anton? His life is so lame!"

"Well you can **try** the next ancestor, but I don't think that branch is accessible yet."

Sure enough, it wasn't accessible. When Desmond attempted to force his way into the memory of Anton's progeny, it felt as if he was hitting an electric fence, only the feeling was concentrated inside his head. The effect was similar to what happened whenever he'd tried to make an ancestor go outside the geographic limits of a memory sequence, but about ten times worse. It didn't physically hurt, but it was still pretty damn unpleasant.

"Fuck. Fine. Back to the amazing antics of Anton then." He reluctantly loaded the next memory, which started with Anton walking into the library-type building where he worked. _If you can call it "work"... I can't imagine how this stuff earns him a living._ As the man settled into his chair behind a desk piled high with dusty tomes, Desmond wondered if he could figure out a way to fall asleep inside the Animus and nap while the memory played.

Funnily enough, it seemed Anton was not in a staying-awake mood either. He skimmed over a couple of pages and scrawled a note in the margin of one, then yawned loudly and dozed off on his desk.

Then something actually happened for once.

"Herr Schreiber!" A startled cry jolted the ancestor awake. He smelled something burning, saw smoke coming from under the door to his office. "Fire!"

Anton scrambled to collect the numerous Bibles from his desk into his arms. The other man- Harman or Hoffman or something like that, Desmond couldn't remember exactly- picked up a chair and used it to break open a window. The two men then clambered out.

"How has this transpired?" Anton coughed as they stumbled across the field.

"Would that I knew! I was in my study when I heard a dreadful noise, as of a heavy object being hurled. I made haste to ascertain the source, and saw flames erupting all along the entryway!"

"Have we been made the target of a Brandstifter?" The translation module failed to process this last word.

"What monströs heathen would set afire a place housing the Holy Writ?"

"A thoroughly monströs one, I suppose." Anton and whatever-his-name-was had come to a shed, setting down the few books they'd managed to rescue and exchanging them for buckets. They then headed off in another direction. _What exactly are they doing?_

"Perhaps the Lutherans-"

His companion looked aghast. "Surely you don't believe even the most extremist of Lutherans could be capable of such an act?"

Anton sighed. "Weak-willed men are sometimes swayed to devilish deeds in these turbulent times."

They came to a horse trough and filled their buckets with water, then made their way back. _Oh, right. Fire department hasn't been invented yet. Derrr._

The paltry two gallons of liquid made little difference on the blazing building. "'Tis of no use, Herr Schreiber! We cannot hope to douse all of the flames in time!"

Anton held up a hand. "Hush... Do you feel that?" He was silent for a moment. Desmond felt a drop of rain on his palm, then another, and another. "Behold!" Anton cried joyously. "The Lord sees our calamity and sends aid!"

Within the next minute, the sprinkling had become a downpour and soon neutralized the inferno.

* * *

><p>The rest of the memory was a return to monotony as Anton and Herr H. sorted out the mess of burnt and soggy debris. After the session ended, Desmond felt like he needed a workout to chase away the boredom.<p>

Their gym wasn't much of one, compared to those he'd visited in his civilian life: just a treadmill, stationary bike, some mats, and a few weight machines. But it sufficed to keep Assassins in fighting condition, not that they did a whole lot of fighting these days.

He had just started his routine when Spencer came out from the adjoining showers, wrapped in a towel.

"Man, Spencer. Those arms," Desmond couldn't help but comment, gaping at the hugely muscled appendages. "You're a freak of nature."

"**I'm** a freak of nature?" He laughed. "Have you looked in a mirror lately?"

"Right," Desmond chuckled, considering the ample abdomen making his loose-fitting A-shirt ride up ridiculously. He had almost forgotten how absurd he looked.

Spencer's smile now turned to an expression of worry. "Did Doc say it was okay for you to keep working out?"

"Why wouldn't it be?" Desmond asked, sulkily feigning ignorance and continuing his set of chest presses.

"Aren't pregnant women supposed to take it easy? Especially this far along?"

"Maybe. But I'm not a pregnant woman."

Spencer made a noise of quiet defeat and left the gym. However, he returned a few minutes later after getting dressed. Desmond had moved on to bicep curls.

"Look, I just don't want you to, like... strain something, hurt yourself... hurt the ah, baby," he stammered, having particular trouble with the last word.

That word bothered Desmond as well, and he snapped. "Stop treating me different just 'cause of this, all right?! You want me to just sit on my ass for months on end? I can't spend all of my time reading and Animusing!"

"Fine! You don't want special treatment, then I'll put you back in the chore rotation," Spencer retorted. "And right now that means get off the machines and come help me in the garden."

* * *

><p>They ambled along the rows of vegetables, plucking whatever looked ripe. "Would be nice if we could plant stuff in the sun," Desmond remarked. The garden, like everything else, had to be in tree cover so as not to be spotted on aerial surveillance.<p>

"Yeah, they'd sure grow a lot better," Spencer said, holding up a pitifully small tomato. "Sorry I flew off the chain at ya this morning."

For a moment, Desmond didn't know what he meant by this, but then he remembered. _Right, the money thing._

"It's just... things were already getting pretty tight, supplies-wise. Now there's gonna be eight Assassins here instead of seven." Spencer sighed despondently. "Really sucks having to live like this sometimes."

Desmond attempted to lighten the mood. "Well, Shaun's gonna start his job at Abstergo soon. That'll bring in some dough for us."

Spencer couldn't help laughing at that. "Right! Maybe we should all go work there. I bet they have awesome benefits."


	15. Feels Neiße

May 23, 2013

"What exactly are you feeling for when you do that?" he asked Stacey as she was prodding the protuberance during one of his many checkups.

"I'm assessing the position. To minimize complications at delivery, he'll need to be situated correctly." The medic pressed the fingers of one hand low, unfazed as always by Desmond's abdominal hair. "That's his head," she explained.

Desmond drew in a short breath, his mind assigning a meaning to the hard ovoid shape he vaguely felt from inside himself.

"We want that part to stay down here, okay?" She then drew her hand upwards from there, staying in contact with his skin. "His spine. He's occiput anterior, which means his back is to your front, which is good." She stopped right below the spot where the normality of the man's pectoral muscles was interrupted by the abrupt outward curve of his pregnancy. "And his buttocks."

"Uh, not **feet**?"

"His legs are all curled up, so they're not palpable from the front. It's called the fetal position for a reason."

Desmond fell silent, mentally picturing the miniature person inside of him. Since the amniocentesis results, he'd known it was human, of course, but this enumeration of body parts just now had concretified the abstraction of "it has Homo Sapiens DNA" to "it is an actual individual human being".

Slowly, hesitantly, as if afraid it might burn him, he laid one hand on the crest of the swelling. His face showed a confused amalgam of emotions: fear, awe, and uncertainty chief amongst them.

Stacey intuited that he needed a minute to himself, and took this time to scrawl notes in the chart.

Desmond's whole body was still, but soon he sensed a movement beneath his fingers. Not the violent jab of a fetal kick, though. This was a smooth lateral rolling type of motion. _He's shifting around... trying to get comfortable... Like I do when I'm trying to sleep with this thing in me._ The man felt a tiny spark of unexpected kinship.

He took a deep breath to steady himself before saying, "God... damn." The expletive wasn't borne of anger this time, but of sheer staggering stupefaction.

"Is this the first time you've actually touched it?"

"I... yeah." Either subconsciously or consciously, he'd kept his hands off the bulge ever since the fateful day when he'd found out what was in there.

"Pretty heavy, right?"

"...In both senses of the word, yeah."

Stacey smiled.

Desmond returned the smile, though his was nervous and unsteady.

"Well, that's the exam over with," she said. "So I'll let you go now." Her patient didn't move. "Or you can stay here a while if you want to. I don't mind."

"Um... Is it... okay for me to keep working out, and stuff?"

Stacey nodded. "Actually I think it's better than okay. Your testosterone is lowered, so you'll lose muscle mass and bone strength if you don't stay active. Just don't work your, what's that jock term... 'core' too hard, okay?"

"Obviously." Desmond allowed his hand to travel over the tightly stretched skin and gently rub a sore spot on his right side. "It already hurts at random times. I sure as hell don't want to make it worse."

"Hurts? How so?" The medic's cobalt eyes reflected concern at this symptom. "Is it hurting now?"

"A little."

"Does it feel like a contraction?"

"I don't know what that would feel like," Desmond said, a little irritated.

"You need to read that book some more. Contractions are the uterine muscles working to get the baby-"

He cut her off. "I know what it **is**, I'm not an **idiot**! I said I don't know what it would **feel** like. Pretty sure this isn't it though." Ceasing to rub it, he circled the location with a finger to show her. "It's just here, like a muscle ache. Happens from time to time in different spots."

"Oh." Stacey relaxed. "Of course. A muscle ache. From the growth. Your anatomy has to shift around in ways it wasn't built for."

His mind drifted to the near future, to the fact that he would eventually find out exactly what contractions felt like. _Guess I really should read more of that book. Try to prepare myself a little._

Unaware of his thoughts, Stacey moved the conversation along to something else. "So, how's the paternity test going? Are you still syncing the Bible translation fellow?"

"Nah, now I'm his son, Waldemar."

She chuckled disbelievingly. "The Dark Lord?"

"Not Voldemort! **Val**-de-**mar**," he enunciated. "It's spelled with a W but that's pronounced like a V 'cuz it's German. I, uh..." Desmond broke eye contact. Broaching this subject was still a little awkward, even with the convenient segue this ancestor's life provided. "I think he's probably gay. Not that I have any problem with gay people." _It's just kind of weird having to ogle other dudes, he left unsaid. Sure hope I can skip any memories that go beyond ogling._

The medic didn't give any reaction besides an "Mm" of acknowledgement, so he ventured asking her outright.

"Is that why you got kicked out?"

"Oh, you think I'm-" A faint touch of smile lines creased her cheeks. "Ah, it's not as straightforward as that. Well, gay or not, Waldemar must have had intercourse at some point because obviously his DNA got passed down, and I'm pretty sure IVF wasn't invented until centuries later."

Desmond couldn't miss the blatant way she changed the topic away from her secret._ Fine. Whatever it is, she doesn't want to talk about it._ "Yeah, he must have gotten with a woman at least once... I mean, unless the same thing happened to him as me."

"Now that'd really be something, if this wasn't the first male pregnancy."

* * *

><p>Waldemar was apparently feeling bold and exploratory today. He'd gone to an unfamiliar part of town. Well, unfamiliar to Desmond at least. It was miles and miles away from his house and his workplace. The war had finished over a year ago but vast swathes of wreckage remained on most streets, the citizens not yet able to repair all that had been destroyed.<p>

The Animus was a strange beast in many ways, and genetic memories were unpredictable in regards to which ones were deemed necessary for the user to progress their synch. For some reason, endless days of Anton's bookworming were considered crucial, but nearly the whole of the epically-named Thirty-Years War that the Schreiber family experienced had been skippable. Desmond wasn't going to question it though. If the Animus decided he didn't have to relive anything in certain decades, it meant he could reach his objective that much faster. And anyway, he'd seen more violence in the last year than most people did in their whole lives: inflicted on and by himself, Altaïr, Ezio, Haytham, Connor, and many others besides. He was a tad desensitized to bloodshed by now, but he still wasn't hankering for any more.

Today's destination turned out to be a run-down but not actually destroyed building, quite nondescript and barely distinguishable from those that surrounded it. He knocked at the door and spoke, a little louder than he normally did, as there was a slight ruckus inside. "Good day to you, sirs. I wish to discuss the Reinheitsgebot."

_The what?_ Sometimes when the translation software missed something, Desmond was able to pick up on the meaning, either from the context it was used in, or by comparing the sound of it to words in languages he did know. But this "Rine-gablibble-boat" was completely indecipherable. _There's no way this place sells boats. We're nowhere near any water._

A latch unlocked on the other side of the door and Waldemar entered warily. It was a tavern. The patrons and staff were all eyeing the new entrant intently, and the ancestor quailed a little under their scrutiny. When the majority of them had finished sizing him up and turned back to their conversations, their drinks, their gambling, he approached the bar and purchased a stein of beer. The glass and the bartender's hands both looked as if they'd never been washed in their life, and there was some small brown thing that looked suspiciously like part of a roach wing floating in the beverage. Desmond was horrified to find himself starting to drink it down without hesitation._ Oh gross gross gross!_ He exerted what control he had over Waldemar's mouth and spit most of it back into the stein, then firmly set it back down on the stained counter. _Sure hope this memory doesn't **require** him to get drunk._

"Haven't seen you in here before," a lilting voice spoke startlingly close to his ear. "Tell me about yourself. Are you new?"

"Ah," Waldemar turned to face the other man, a middle-aged fellow with jolly blue eyes and a charcoal beard. "I... I am newly a patron of this precise establishment, though I have lived in fair Neiße since boyhood."

"And what of your manhood?"

Waldemar took some moments to consider the question, during which Desmond was left to wonder what the fuck the question even meant.

"My m- manhood," Waldemar stammered, looking slightly away from the older man- Desmond used this opportunity to scan the other taverngoers, some of whom were eavesdropping on their dialogue- "I should hazard a guess that it is similar in fashion to the spirit of your own."

"Have you yet put it to a proving?" His enquirer's eyes twinkled and his beard split to reveal a playful grin. Desmond had a strange hunch, which he immediately hoped would not turn out true.

That hope was immediately dashed when the beardo added, "If not, I would gladly offer to **spearhead** your **maiden** voyage." Laughter bubbled from all around them.

_Christ on a cracker. This is some kind of old-timey gay bar! I'm being propositioned!_ Desmond panicked. _Shit, shit, shit, do not want, do not want!_ His heart- or was it Waldemar's heart?- pounded loudly in his ears.

But it wasn't his heart. Or at least, it wasn't **solely** his heart. Someone was pounding, extremely hard, on the door. It didn't sound like they were using their fists. There were four violent thumps- the bar patrons were all frozen on the spot- and on the fifth there was a colossal inward explosion of wooden debris.

Desmond recognized the uniforms of the town guards. There were six of them, and they had used a battering ram to break into the place. Four of those strode inside in lock step, two remaining at the door, turning outwards to serve as sentinels- _against what exactly?_- but, no, there were **seven**, not six. The seventh was clearly higher in rank than the others, and he was clomping straight towards Waldemar and his prospective partner.

"Accursed Sodomiten!" Number Seven's booming rage reverberated in Waldemar's very bones. "You besmirch-"

What they were besmirching remained unknown, for just then, a previously-unseen figure swooshed down from the rafters, falling atop the antagonist with a sickly **squelch**. Desmond jumped back in alarm just as the ancestor must have done, but only Desmond felt a thrill of recognition.

The white cloak.

His savior wasted no time once he'd landed, and in less than a second he'd drawn two vicious swords from under that cloak. The men at the door were gashed open before they had even opened their mouths to cry out in surprise at the unexpected newcomer. The left sword stuck fast in its victim and the warrior had to jerk that hand back with extra force to remove it. This action caused a corresponding backward movement in the fabric on his arm, revealing a small glimpse of what he wore beneath.

The Hidden Blade.

He hadn't seen an Assassin in any of his son's genetic memories before, but he was sure as fuck seeing one now. And a fucking **awesome** one at that.

Desmond was ecstatic, but Waldemar was nearly pissing himself with fear. He bolted from his seat and made for a window, which some of the other terrified taverngoers were prying open. But then a guard was in his path, and socked him full in the stomach, and he crumpled to the floor.

Through eyelids narrowed in pain, he saw Punchy Guard fall down a moment later. Behind him stood a second Assassin, whose blade now retracted just as silently as it had engaged. Someone helped Waldemar to his feet and was leading him to the window, and he managed to ask, "Who..."

"Friends," came the cool reply. Assassin Two stabbed another guard. "We are friends." Assassin Three made a sudden movement with the arm that wasn't supporting Waldemar, and the harsh report of a gunshot made his ears ring. Through the din, he thought he could make out Three's voice saying something about "enemies".

"I- ah!" Waldemar was thrust out of the window. "What-"

"Now is not the time for questions. Leave this place. More of them will arrive soon. We cannot fight them and protect you simultaneously."

The ancestor took this advice and fled with his fellows. Desmond heard the telltale chime of the Animus notifying him that he'd synced a sequence completely.

Rebecca wasn't in her usual spot at the computer when he exited. She was just coming into the room. "Sorry, my bathroom break got a little sidetracked by something your dad-" She stopped dead in her tracks as her eyes alighted on the screen. "Holy shit. Your vitals are crazy! What the hell did you just relive that got you so worked up?"

"ASSASSINS!" Desmond nearly yelled in delight. "They saved me! They saved me!"

"Saved Wally, you mean," Rebecca said, using the nickname she'd given to this ancestor.

"Saved both of us! Saved him from getting caught being gay, and saved me from having to relive him doing gay stuff!"

* * *

><p>Notes:<p>

"Good day to you, sirs. I wish to discuss the Reinheitsgebot." - The secret passcode to get into the old-timey gay bar. The Reinheitsgebot is a German law enforced since the 1500s concerning the purity of beer.

"**spearhead** your **maiden** voyage" - Would either of those puns work in German? IDK but let's not think about that, just assume they would.


	16. Rain

Desmond never saw Waldemar venture back to that tavern after it was raided. Either the fainthearted German had calculated that indulging his sexual desires was not worth risking his life over, or the Animus mercifully decided to skip over any return visits.

He kept his eyes peeled for more Assassins. While reliving memories at the clothier where Waldemar worked, he paid particular attention to any customers who requested hooded or white apparel.

One day, he thought he'd spotted one. The tall man walked into the shop with a barely detectable limp and asked to have his tunic repaired. Waldemar set about mending the garment, which had a large sharp tear, and Desmond imagined this was due to a vicious sword swipe from some intense scuffle with a Templar or two.

When he handed the tunic back to its owner, Desmond conspicuously bent Waldemar's ring finger back the same way Lucy had. However, if the customer noticed this phalangeal allusion, he didn't show any reaction to it.

Later, Desmond would wonder what exactly he'd expected the maybe-Assassin to do. The Animus was only a simulated recreation of the past, after all, and he couldn't divert the progression of events too far from what the genetic memories had recorded, or he'd desync. Derrr. So the guy wouldn't be able to do anything vastly different than what had actually happened that day in 1650. He certainly wouldn't look up at Waldemar and go, "Why yes, I **am** an Assassin! Thanks for noticing! Would you like to tag along while I shank some Templar Knights?"

_I'm really a dumbass sometimes._

* * *

><p>May 27, 2013<p>

"Desmond!" Shaun called from outside Desmond's bedroom.

There was no indication he was heard, so he called again louder, and rapped on the door as well.

"Smmf." Shaun wasn't sure if this was a response, or if Desmond was still asleep and snoring very weirdly. He never used to snore before... but then again, he never used to have a uterus either, so who knows?

"Get **up**, Desmond!"

"Mmmüde..." Shaun, not realizing the muffled sound was German, ignored it as gibberish, opened the door a crack, flipped the light on, and repeated himself.

The named man, who was sleeping atop the covers wearing a ratty robe, remained motionless and made another unintelligible vocalization. He was really quite a grotesque sight, at least in Shaun's estimation.

"Wake up already, you fat twit!"

"Shuddup, m'not fat, m'prenant," he grumbled, the pronunciation lazy since he was barely opening his mouth.

"It's a lot easier for me to think of you as just fat. Please allow me that luxury."

"Who cares what's easy for **you**?! **I'm** the one this is happening to! You think this is easy for **me**?" He sounded fully awake now, but still didn't move from the bed.

"Whatever! You're on kitchen duty this week. You didn't want any special treatment, remember?"

"I'll do it this afternoon," Desmond muttered, half-whining.

"It's half past one already! Get your rear in gear!"

His head snapped up. "What? No way it's one-thirty!" He stared angrily at the clock. "Shit, you're right."

"Of course I'm right! Now get up and clean up the mess in the mess!" Shaun slammed the door.

_Damn, I really slept all morning?_ Desmond had been awoken around 23:00 by his compressed bladder pleading to be emptied. After which he'd needed a midnight snack. When he got back to his bedroom, he'd banged his knee on the stupid crib. And then the kid had started to jostle around inside of him. It had taken almost two hours for him to fall back asleep. And then he'd had some surreal dream where a Piece of Eden had made him pregnant. He chuckled to himself, thinking, _Nope, that's my actual life these days. Well, I guess sleeping half the day is better than waking up puking._

When he got to the kitchen, he was greeted by a foul odor, a sink full of dishes, and a counter covered with food residue. _It's like they purposefully made a lot of work for me, since I haven't been doing chores for a while._ He had been hungry, but the smell immediately put a stop to that, so he set about his assigned task.

Once the dishes and counter had been dealt with, which took a while, Desmond found the source of the smell: the kitchen waste bin. "Ugh." As he hauled the rank bucket outside to the compost heap, he couldn't help but think that surely Altaïr, Ezio, et al. never had to do this type of menial shit.

He was trudging back to the building, rubbing at another damn muscle ache in his back, when it dawned on him that he hadn't seen anybody since Shaun's wake-up call. He looked around the exterior of the Compound a bit, checking out the firing range, the makeshift obstacle course, the practice arena, the garden. All were deserted. "Where the hell is everybody?" Desmond called out.

He hadn't expected a response, but one came from somewhere above him. "Rebs and your old man just left to pick up a supply drop. The two S-men are off checkin' the integrity of the perimeter. Doc's in her office. You, me, and baby makes three are right here."

"Thanks, Colin," he said to the unseen sentry in the trees.

"So, how's manternity treatin' ya?"

Desmond didn't like carrying on a conversation with someone he couldn't see, so he shifted into Eagle Vision and looked up to scan the forest canopy until he located the glow of Colin crouching on a branch, hidden from normal view by layers of leaves. "Well, I guess it's not as bad as it used to be, but shit still kinda sucks. Can't do Assassin stuff. Have to piss all the time. Shaun called me fat."

"Yeah, he's still in denial about the whole thing. Nearly fainted when he saw us makin' the crib. Hey, did you know he said he was goin' to knock you up?"

"Gurrk!" Desmond's throat involuntarily emitted a retching sound. "He what?! **Shaun** said that?!"

"Yeah."

"What the fuck?! Why? When? What?"

"A while ago." Colin's voice was way too calm.

"You better not be messing with me, dude!" he shrieked. "**Shaun** did this to me?! On **purpose**? **How**?!"

"Cool your jets, D. This was after you were already preggers."

Preggers or no, Desmond had half a mind to climb up and throttle Colin for acting so unperturbed about this. "You're telling me Shaun said he's gonna knock me up **again**?! And I'm supposed to **cool my jets**?! Where is that jerkoff, anyway?" He squinted into the distance until he spotted two faraway blue specks. "Over there, right, Col?"

"Yuh-huh."

Was it Desmond's imagination or did Colin actually sound amused? He didn't care right now. He strode angrily toward the specks, not caring that it was starting to rain.

* * *

><p>Spencer spotted him first. "Desmond! Why you out here, dude? Something wrong?"<p>

"I'll tell you what's wrong! Shaun!" He pointed a furious finger.

"Moi?"

"Yeah, **you**! Colin told me you..." Desmond wasn't able to directly invoke the threatened re-impregnation. "He told me what you said! You sicko!"

"Huh?"

He shoved Shaun backwards. "Don't play dumb, Mister Smartypants! What you said about me!"

"Fuck's sake Desmond, get a hold of yourself!" Shaun sputtered, barely managing to keep from falling ass-first into the mud. "I have no idea what you're on about! Honest!"

"You... " Desmond's fury became subdued as he realized the confusion was genuine. "He... he said..."

"What? What precisely did he say that I said?"

"He said..."

"Yeah, I got that part." Shaun took off his glasses, the lenses misted over from the light precipitation, and wiped them on his shirt.

"...Never mind. Guess he was kidding." Desmond deflated and fell against a tree, staring at the ground. "Of course he was kidding." _What the fuck, Desmond?_ an inner voice of reason spoke up. _Shaun's an asshole sometimes, but you actually believed he could be a **rapist**? You're a fucking idiot!_

Spencer wiped his dripping bangs out of his eyes. "Christ, that thing's sure making you have some insane mood swings!"

"My kid's not a **thing**." The words spilled from Desmond's mouth unbidden and didn't register in his brain until several seconds later. He looked up, scarred lip quirked in bemusement. "Shit, did I really just say that?"

"Yes, you did."

"I..." _I called him "mine"_, he thought, but couldn't bring himself to say it out loud.

Frigid droplets began to fall heavier upon the trio.

"Come on, let's get back in before it really starts coming down," Spencer said, offering a hand to the pregnant man, who rejected it, saying, "I can walk by myself, thank you very much!"

Shaun regarded Desmond's robe with contempt. "Can't believe you're still wearing that bloody thing."

"Fuck off, it's comfortable and it fits."

They walked on for a bit before Shaun spoke again. "You mind telling me what incited your little hissy fit?"

"... Colin has a really fucked-up sense of humor."

"Well I knew that."

Desmond turned to face him. "Not just 'weird' fucked-up, like 'sick psychopath' fucked-up... He told me you said you were going to knock me up again!"

Both Spencer and Shaun inexplicably chortled.

"What the hell's funny about it?!"

"Oh, for chrissake..." Shaun lightly patted Desmond's shoulder. "**Knock** on your **door** and **wake** you **up**."

"What? That's not what that means!"

"Yeah, I tried to tell him that! But I guess it **does** mean that over in jolly ole England." Spencer retold the story between heaves of laughter. "It was a few months back, back before- Ah, hah, hah! Before we even knew about your whole uterus deal. We were all getting ready for training exercises one morning, and you were asleep and ha-ha-he goes 'I'll go knock up Desmond, then.' Pffft! So of course we all go 'Dude, that's not physically possible!' Hah-hah! Shows what we know!"

"You American wankers just have to turn everything into a sexual innuendo, don't you! Trust me, Desmond, I am **not** into you that way. Definitely not."


	17. Blast from the Past

May 29, 2013

Desmond walked- yes, **walked**, he was determined to never start fucking **waddling**- into Rebecca's workroom, slightly warmer than the other rooms due to all the computers constantly churning away, and plopped down in the Animus chair. But before he could lean his head back into the brain-scanny part to actually enter the thing, she grabbed his shoulder.

"Hey, wait a sec. You wanna try something?"

"Tell me what it is first and I'll consider it."

"Well, last night I had this amazing dream-"

"Good for you. Last night I had this guy kickboxing my kidneys!" he said, a little more angrily than he'd intended.

"Lemme finish! I had this dream, right, I don't remember what it was anymore, but it gave me an awesome idea for reconfiguring the synchro matrix!"

"That's something in the Animus, I'm guessing?"

"Yeah, it's the whole backbone of the thing, the heart of Baby's code!" she gushed proudly.

"Right. So... what would this reconfiguration do?"

"Should let you progress through baby's memories a lot quicker."

"Can you not call them both 'Baby'? Confusing as fuck."

"Sorry, I mean Junior's memories," Rebecca clarified. "I've already compiled the new code, so, if you're up for it, I'll go ahead and integrate the changes."

Desmond frowned slightly. "Why you asking me? I'm up for whatever lets me sync faster. Unless you're not sure it'll work?"

"Oh, it'll work, I just wanted to let you know first. I'm not sure what the changes will look like on your end. So if things seem a little," in lieu of an adjective, she wobbled her hands back and forth in the air, "when you get in there, then don't freak out on me."

"Duly noted. Let's get going." He started to lean back, but suddenly sat up again.

"You okay?"

"Gimme a minute." Desmond bent forward and rubbed a pinched nerve in his back. "God, this guy is getting heavy. Your faster syncing thing better work, 'cause it's getting really uncomfortable to be in that position."

"You can't feel it once you're in a memory sequence, though, right?"

"No, but I sure as hell feel it when I get back out after three hours."

"You need a pillow or something?"

His first instinct was to save his pride, to say_ No, I don't need a fucking pillow_, but that would have been a lie. "Yes," Desmond admitted, albeit pouting slightly as he said it. "That would be nice."

* * *

><p>The white room looked and felt the same as ever, but it was taking longer than usual to load up the memory. He would be starting on a new ancestor today, and used the extra moments to wonder what kind of person he'd be reliving this time, and how many more he might have to go through before finding out the identity of the kid's other parent.<p>

_The kid. My kid._ He was still unable to deal with the concept of having a "child", a "son", or a "baby", but the informal term "kid" was a whole lot more manageable.

The floor of the loading area- inasmuch as there was one- abruptly dropped out from under his virtual feet. _Holy shit, this never happened before! _The Desmond avatar was falling into a bottomless void, while his actual body felt like vomiting. He struggled against the nausea as he plummeted downward for ten seconds, twenty, thirty, fourty-

Then he was still falling but he wasn't in the void anymore. He was... fuck. Where was he? When was he? Who was he?

His visual field was assaulted with rapid-fire images of a battle, a wedding, a river, a barn, a sword, a horse, a woman, a snowy mountaintop, a man waving a flag, another woman- Desmond's mind felt like it would burst. He'd felt something similar when the computerized Clay Kaczmarek had embraced him inside the Animus, protecting him from deletion, and forcing every single one of Clay's memories into him at the same time.

He tried to call out to Rebecca, to tell her he needed to stop, to tell her the memories were coming too fast, but his muscles were frozen and he could hardly breathe, let alone speak. _Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck_ he thought, hoping the monitoring systems would alert her that something was going terribly wrong with her stupid "upgrade".

And now there were voices: dozens, no, **hundreds** of them, men, women, children, chanting, singing, shouting, squabbling, every sentence indecipherable and overlapping the others.

Desmond wouldn't be able to take three more minutes of this onslaught, let alone three whole hours.

And then there were smells and tastes as well: fire, vodka, gunpowder, perfume, sauerkraut, and more, all muddling together in a sickening melange, and he was still falling. He really was going to vomit if this kept going.

Gradually, mercifully, the awful din of voices from the past quelled, and the flashing visions slowed and slowed, stopping on a final ancestral remembrance of a weatherbeaten wooden sign reading "Lublin", which in time faded to black, then to gray, then to a reassuringly familiar white.

Desmond closed exhausted eyes and took slow, shuddering breaths, savoring the blissful absence of stimuli. Some of the flavors and odors still lingered, but they were much less intense.

"Holy shit, Desmond, I am so so sorry!" Rebecca's sincere apology blared painfully on his overworked auditory nerves. "I **so** did **not** know that would happen, I tried to pull you out as soon as-"

"Chh..." he hissed in an attempt to silence her.

"Are you okay?!"

"Nie mów." The foreignness of his command hit Desmond like a ton of bricks, and his eyes shot open. "Co? Co mówiłem? Co ja mówię? Co to za język!?" His voice became more frantic with each question. "Rebecca!? To jest złe! **Bardzo** złe!"

He could tell Rebecca had no idea what he was saying. And, worse than that, Desmond wasn't exactly sure either. The few previous language bleeds he'd experienced had all seemed to him as if he was speaking English, but this time he couldn't even understand himself.

Thoroughly alarmed, he tried to get up, to get away from the damn Animus, but he was so incredibly disoriented, and there was something screwing up his balance, pulling him forward- _Kurwa! Zapomniałem że jestem w ciąży!_

Desmond tumbled uncontrollably onto his hands and knees. "Rebecca..." He tried not to sob.

She squatted down on the floor next to him. "Desmond. I'm so sorry-"

"Na... nawet nie moje myśli są po angielsku."

"I... I can't understand you. I'm sorry."

"Wiem." He managed to sit up, though the room was still swaying a little. "Ja też nie." Swaying a lot, actually.

"Don't talk. Just... just try to calm down," Rebecca said, though she sounded far from calm herself. She'd never seen him- or **anyone**- have this bad of a reaction from such a short exposure. "Look at me. Focus. Think of the good ol' US of A. Think of South Dakota, New Yor-"

"Ciii. Bolą moje uszy." Desmond cupped a hand over one ear to convey what he meant, that he physically couldn't bear all this talking, and held out his other hand to request assistance getting off the floor.

She helped pull him to a standing position. "Oof. Man, you really **are** heavy."

Desmond surprised himself by responding with, "Derr!" Apparently there was no equivalent in whatever this language was.

Rebecca smiled a tiny bit at the familiar syllable. "Well... other than the language thing, do you feel all right? Any hallucinations or anything like that?"

He considered the question. Yes, he was still woozy, but the phantom smells and tastes had mostly dissipated, and he wasn't seeing any ghostly figures. The only other remnant of his traumatic trip through the experimental synchro matrix was the fact that he was clammy with sweat. "Nie halucynacje, ale muszę wziąć prysznic," Desmond told her, miming scrubbing motions on his body.

She nodded in understanding. "Shower. Okay. Just make sure you don't slip and fall."

He nodded and put a hand on his stomach. "Poprawny. Mogłyby zranić dzieciak, gdybym spadł. Może kąpiel będzie bezpieczniej."

She grinned. "You actually care about the lil' parasite now, don't ya?"

"...Trochę."

* * *

><p>After his bath, Desmond shuffled slowly along the hallway from the bathroom to his quarters, keeping a hand on the wall to steady himself, trying to think English thoughts. <em>Nazywam się Desmond Miles. Jestem w Vermont, nie pierdolonym Lublin. Jest rok dwa tysiące thirteen.<em> He let out a small triumphant laugh upon finally recalling a word in the proper language._ Yes. Twenty-thirteen... The year is 2013... My name is Desmond Miles, and jestem Asasyn. Kurwa!_ He smacked himself in the face, drawing the attention of his father, who was just coming out from the kitchen and turned to stare quizzically at him.

"Is there a problem, Desmond?"

_Kurwa. Nie chcę Dad wiedzieć. On będzie mnie do zakazać korzystania w Animus_, Desmond thought. _Nigdy nie mógłbym dowiedzieć się kto jest rodzicem dzieciaka._ With considerable effort behind the selection of each word, he answered, "I... am... okay."

William gave him one of those trademark looks, almost like he had his own version of Eagle Vision that worked as a lie detector. "No, you're obviously not."

"Yes... I..." Staying in English mode was absurdly taxing, and his legs wobbled noticeably.

"You... what? What's happening? Are you... in labor?"

"Nie!" Desmond said, then hastily tried to cover his slip. "Nie-ooo. No. Not."

"Don't bullshit me! When did it start?"

"Dad! I'm... not..." he tried to assert, but he was already being forcibly hustled along to the infirmary.

* * *

><p>"Ms. Russ, Desmond's in labor," William said immediately when they arrived. His tone was businesslike, but with a hint of irritation.<p>

Stacey dropped the thick book she had been poring over. "Since when?!"

"He won't say. If you ask me, it must be pretty bad, because he's having difficulty talking properly and he can barely stand up on his own."

Desmond couldn't trust his screwed-up mouth to get a word in edgewise and not have it come out as a string of unintelligible consonants, so he resigned himself to slouching against the wall with his arms crossed.

"Come on, Desmond," Stacey said, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder. "Premature labor is serious. You should have come to see me straight away." He shook his head. "Did your water break yet?"

He shook his head again. _Oczywiście moja woda nie odejść! Bo nie jestem w porodu!_

"Hurts too much to talk? Okay, come on, take a seat, just let me know when the contraction's over."

"No," he said, confident in that word at least, and punctuated it by staring daggers at his father.

The medic followed his gaze. "You want him to leave?"

Desmond scowled.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Miles. He-"

"Fine." William threw up his hands. "I'll leave. Just make sure he's okay."

"Okay, he's gone. So talk to me, Desmond."

He took a deep breath. "I'm..." Finding himself still unable to formulate full sentences in English, he again resorted to mimery, placing both hands on his abdomen and pressing in on it slightly with an emphatic "No."

"You don't want to give birth. You don't want to have a baby. Of course you don't, but it's going to happen."

He sighed in exasperation, walked across the room and pointed to today's date on the calendar, then to his belly again, then back to the calendar. "No!"

"Yes, I know you're not due until July. I told you pregnancy is unpredictable."

Desmond surprised her by taking a random paper off her desk, grabbing a pen, and...

Well, he **tried** to write something like "Goddamnit, leave me alone, I am not in labor!" but his hand wouldn't cooperate. It wrote "Cho" and he scratched that out. It wrote "Zos" and he scratched that out as well. It wrote "Nie" and he chucked the pen against the wall in rage.

Stacey had approached him warily to see what he was writing, but she jerked away at the violent penflinging. "Desmond! What is going on!?"

Giving up at last, he looked her square in the face. "Nie jestem w porodu."

She blinked a few times. "Huh?"

"Rebecca zmienił coś w Animus."

"Animus..." Stacey's eyes and mouth widened as disquieted recognition washed over her. "Oh my god. You're experiencing-"

"Efektu Krwawienia," he said, way past the point of her needing to tell him. "Wiem."

"My god, Desmond. How long has it-" She shook her head. "Never mind. You can't answer in any way that I could understand... Can you say anything in English besides 'No'?"

Desmond sat down and concentrated. "I... it's... trudny. Kurwa!" He swore, and tried again. "It's... hard." A hand went to his aching head. "Angiel... no, English. English sprawia boli mnie głowa."

"You didn't want anyone to know."

"Rebecca wie."

"You didn't want anyone except Rebecca to know," she amended.

He nodded.

"This is really serious, Desmond! You can't keep something like that secret!"

"To nie jest takie złe," he started to counter, but then switched to halting English in an attempt to better convince her. "Not... bad."

"Yes, it **is** bad! I've never personally seen someone suffering Bleeding Effects before, but I've read about them and they are **very** bad!"

"No... halucynacje." He gestured to his eyes and then made a thumbs up sign. "Wiem że... I'm Desmond. Not..." he racked his frazzled brain for the word 'ancestor' but couldn't find it, "Not przodkiem." _Po prostu nie mogę mówić ani myśleć ani nawet pisać!_

Stacey frowned at him for a minute, then closed her eyes and sighed. "Okay. Here's a proposal." She ticked off the next sentences on her fingers. "You stay here in the infirmary and I'll monitor you until this wears off. If it wears off soon- say, within the next hour- then I'll tell your father that I was able to halt the premature labor. If it doesn't wear off by then, or if it gets worse, I'll have to tell him the truth."

"Zgo... Okay."

She handed him the chart labeled "Miles, Desmond". "Read this. It's in English and it's all about you and the modern era, so it should help you focus and get back to normal."

He opened the folder and balked at the contents. "No."

"Okay, not 'normal', I mean you'll still be a pregnant man-"

"Not... English."

"What?"

Desmond held it up, pointed to the meaningless lists of numbers punctuated by inscrutable acronyms, and she understood. "Oh, right. It's all medical jargon. Okay, I'll get you something else to read."

Stacey went in her office for a few minutes. When she returned, she was smiling and handed him a little white hardcover. "I've been told this one was a classic back on the Farm."

Desmond felt weirdly nostalgic at the sight of Alphabetical Initiation. He opened it and started to hear voices from the past in his head again. But this time they were in English, and were people he'd actually met in his own life.

_A a We **a**re **A**ssassins._

_B b Assassins **b**elong to the **B**rotherhood._

_C c The Assassin's **C**reed is **c**enturies old._

This book been read out loud to him and the other kids countless times._ Przypuszczam będę go czytać to my kid too_, he thought, and was delighted to realize that he was starting to understand his thoughts again.

* * *

><p>Poor Desmond's Bleeding Effect, translated for your convenience:<p>

Shh...  
>Don't talk. What? What did I say? What am I saying? What language is this!?... Rebecca!? This is bad! Really bad!<br>Fuck! I forgot I'm pregnant!  
>Ev... Even my thoughts aren't in English.<br>I know. I can't either.  
>Shh. My ears hurt.<br>No hallucinations, but I need a shower.  
>Right. Might hurt the kid if I fall. Maybe a bath would be safer.<br>... Kind of.  
>My name is Desmond Miles. I'm in Vermont, not motherfucking Lublin. The year is two thousand (thirteen)... I am an Assassin. Fuck!<br>Fuck. I don't want Dad to know. He'll ban me from using the Animus. Then I'll never find out who's the kid's parent.  
>No!<br>Of course my water didn't break! Because I'm not in labor!  
>I'm not in labor.<br>Rebecca changed something in the Animus.  
>Bleeding Effect. I know.<br>It's hard. Fuck! ... (English) makes my head hurt.  
>Rebecca knows.<br>It's not that bad.  
>(No) hallucinations. I know (I'm Desmond, not) ancestor. I just can't talk or think or even write!<br>Oka..  
>I suppose I'll read it (to my kid too.)<p> 


	18. Feedback

Rebecca came by Desmond's room later that afternoon, and found him on his bed reading _Pregnancy 101_. "How you doing, bud? Better?"

"Yeah."

"Listen, I'm really sorry about-"

He waved her words away. "You already apologized enough, I forgive you. You were trying to help me. Just don't tell my dad it happened."

"Why not?"

"Isn't it obvious? He'll freak out and tell me I can't go in the Animus anymore. And he'll be all angry at you too probably."

"Good point." She caught sight of _Alphabetical Initiation_, which he'd tossed into the crib. "What's that?"

He got up and retrieved the book to show her. "ABCs for kids of Assassins."

"Woah, seriously?"

"Yeah, like, for example, 'V' says 'Do you have Eagle **V**ision? It is **v**ery rare.'" He held it open to the specified page, complete with a suitably juvenile illustration of a glowy-eyed person.

She laughed. "That is too fucking adorable."

"It's misleading, though," Desmond said. "My eyes don't do that. They should have drawn some Templars glowing red, or something like that."

"Well, from what I've heard you're the first person with Eagle Vision in a long time. So whoever made that book didn't have any idea how it worked."

"Needs an updated edition then." He dropped it back into the crib. "Speaking of updates, you deleted that messed-up new code, right?"

"Yeah. Well. Not 'deleted' per se, but I reverted the synchro matrix back the way it was, and put the fucked-up configuration in a separate partition, so I can take a closer look at it later to figure out what went wrong, see where it could be fixed."

"Mm."

"What was it like?"

"Terrible. I don't wanna talk about it."

"Okay," Rebecca said, and changed the topic. "How's Junior?"

Desmond shrugged. "He's fine, I guess. It's just like you said, the Animus doesn't affect him."

"Your whole foreign language freakout didn't scare him?"

"How'm I supposed to know? I can't read his mind. Does he even **have** emotions at this point? All I know is whether he's moving around, and he does that seemingly at random, Bleeding Effect or not." _Geez, I'm barely even used to this guy existing, and now I have to start considering his emotions?_

Rebecca was silent a few moments, and then she asked, "Can I feel?"

Desmond wrinkled his nose at the suggestion. "You already felt."

"That was ages ago!"

"Ugh, fine. Dunno why you even want to, but fine." He grudgingly lifted his shirt. "You won't even feel anything. He's not moving right now."

Rebecca poked his belly button. "I didn't know you had an outie."

He felt a touch of redness rise to his cheeks. "I didn't **used to**! Didn't used to have stretch marks either! Or a fucking hole in my taint! This kid sure better appreciate all the shit I'm going through for him!"

"All right, chill out. Hewwo dere," she rubbed and cooed at his stomach. "My name's Webecca!"

"Christ, can you save the stupid baby talk for **after** he's born?" Desmond paused a few beats and then said, "Speaking of which... um..."

"Yeah?"

"I... I need to ask you something."

"Go ahead then."

He conspicuously looked away from her before blurting, "What's a menstrual cramp feel like?", trying to say it as fast as possible.

Rebecca just stared.

"See, the book says contractions feel 'just like a menstrual cramp, only stronger!' Well that's not real helpful to me, is it?! So what the fuck do those feel like?"

She had to restrain herself from laughing at the absurdity of the situation. "Well... things get all crampy and squeezy. And it hurts like a bitch. I'm pretty sure you'll know a contraction when you feel it."

"Well I didn't know when I was **pregnant**! I didn't know when I was growing a goddamn **vagina**!"

"You didn't know those were going to happen, though," she pointed out. "You do know you're going to give birth."

Desmond made a noise of repugnance. "Wish I didn't have to."

"Yeah, from what I've heard, it's not exactly a day at the beach." Rebecca was about to remove her hands when she felt a movement. "Oh! There he goes! Hey there. Who's a widdle Apple-baby? You are! Yes you are! Widdle Apple-baby, be sure to come out nice and quick and easy for your daddy when you're born, all wighty?"

'Daddy' laughed. "I don't think that's something he can control."

* * *

><p>Bad Weather was ridiculously busy tonight, and for some reason Desmond was the only one working the bar. There was a poundingly loud and achingly bad dubstep thing playing, which he didn't want to dignify by calling it a "song". A customer was trying to order something, but his speech wasn't clear. Was that because of the DJ's thumping bass? The man's thick accent? The screaming baby in the background? <em>Who the fuck brought a baby to a nightclub anyway? Someone oughtta call Child Protective Services!<em>

"Sorry, say again?!" Desmond shouted at the customer.

"Chemene pivo!"

"I don't know what that is!?"

"Alcohol!"

"Yeah, but what kind?!"

He yelled another garbled mess and pointed behind the bar.

Desmond took a beer bottle from the general direction he'd indicated and hoped it was the right one.

It wasn't. The man screamed something, turned, and stomped angrily away.

"Seventeen, you idiot, that's not what he ordered!"

Desmond was suddenly confronted by his supervisor. "Sorry, boss! I couldn't-"

"No excuses! You'll just have to drink it yourself!"

"What? The bottle's not even open. I'll just put it back-"

"Drink it! Or are you a **pussy**?"

"I..." Desmond was suddenly aware of how tight his apron was over his swollen stomach. "I can't!"

"Why the fuck not?"

"Because I'm..."

Out of nowhere, a chorus of frat boys surrounded him, chanting "Chug! Chug! Chug!"

He raised his voice over the cacophony. "I can't!"

"Drink that Corona now, or you're fired!"

His throat was raw from the sheer strain of producing sufficient volume to be heard. "I can't drink!"

"Why the fuck not, **pussy**?"

Desmond's mouth said "I'm pregnant" but it somehow came out as "I'm an Assassin!"

The frat boys abruptly morphed into a squad of Redcoats, and their leader, who inexplicably had a 1920's mobster accent, roared, "That's the guy! The preggo Assassin with the magical genes! Get 'im, boys!"

Desmond turned and ran, taking down one of the Redcoats by shattering the beer over his head, and leapt over the bar counter, and then he was shoving his way through the masses of dancing drunkards.

"That's it, Seventeen! Your ass is grass! I want your desk cleared out by the end of the day!" sang out his supervisor nonsensically.

He couldn't move, he was trapped between gyrating bodies on the dancefloor, and then a bear lifted up its huge paw and swiped huge claws across Desmond's huge stomach and he fell backwards, splashing into the floor which had turned to water without notice.

Then he woke up. "Gah!... Jesus Christ. What a fucking weird-ass dream."


	19. Downtime

May 30, 2013

Desmond was taking a couple days off from his kid's ancestors, allowing Rebecca some time to adjust the Animus, "to get it jiggered right in the Goldilocks zone" as she put it. He hadn't understood all of what she'd said, really._ Something about spooling the nucleus, or the nucleotides, or the neurons, or whatever, more efficiently... Or was it **un**spooling?_ Anyway, the gist of it was that she was trying to make the memories unlock just a bit faster than they'd been going beforehand, but nowhere near the crazy fast-forward pandemonium that fucked him up the last time.

"You don't need to do this, you know," he'd told her. "I'm okay with just going at the same rate, and if I don't find out his other parent before he's born, it's not the end of the world."

"Nah, it's no problem, I like working on this stuff. It's been ages since I had a good challenging project," she'd replied, happily typing and talking simultaneously. "And you never know when we might get surprised by another crazy race against the clock to find some other maguffin hidden in history. Then we'd need to be able to sync as fast as possible."

At first he wasn't sure what to do with the three free hours, but then he thought of something, and headed to Stacey's office.

"Hm? Desmond? Is something the matter?"

"Nope, I'm good." He drummed his belly lightly. "We're both good. I wanna see my medical file."

"Oh, okay." She kept Desmond's chart right on her desk most of the time these days, so she barely had to move to get it. "Any part in particular?"

"The part where I'm a baby." A nervous smile. "I bet you could have guessed that."

"Pull up a seat, I'll show you."

Desmond dragged a chair from the other side of the room to the desk and sat down as Stacey opened the binder. "Hey, am I going crazy or wasn't this in a folder before?" he asked.

"It was, but you saw how full it was getting. That folder wouldn't have been able to hold together much longer, so I punched holes and put everything into this binder instead."

"Heh. Sorry my life involves so much medical stuff."

Stacey smiled. "Not your fault, obviously. Okay, I've got it reverse chronologically, so your birth records are at the very back." She turned the majority of the mass of paper over to the left side, and then flipped slowly through the remainder until she came to a page with a color copy of a Polaroid photo labeled in marker: "March 13 1987, Desmond Nicholas Miles, 8 lb. 5 oz."

"This is me, huh." He leaned closer. "This is really me."

"It's really you," the medic confirmed.

Desmond chuckled. "Yeah, I know, I know it's me. Just can't tell. This guy looks so different. No hair, no scar, no tattoo..." He contemplated the smiling infant, trying and failing to recognize any familar features. "And such an innocent and naïve face. Not a care in the world. Tabula rasa and all that."

Stacey "Mm"ed in agreement.

He chuckled again. "It'd be funny to see a picture of my face the first time Dad told me there's a giant evil conspiracy to get us. I probably looked like that Home Alone kid." He made a comically exaggerated face of terror and clapped his hands to his cheeks.

"Heh, yeah."

Desmond turned to the next page.

"Okay, now this part is copied from your mother's chart. Prenatal checkups and labor notes."

He started reading it, curiosity outweighing sorrow for the time being. "'Advanced maternal age'? I'm pretty sure Mom wasn't **old** when she had me."

"35 or older is considered 'advanced maternal age'. It's just a medical term. Statistics show that complications arise more often after then."

"Uh, okay. So she was 'advanced maternal age, otherwise low-risk primigravida'. What's that?"

"'Primigravida' means a woman during her first pregnancy."

He nodded. "Right. 'Low-risk', huh? What about me, what's my 'risk'?"

"Well, I'd definitely classify a male pregnancy as high-risk simply due to sheer singularity. But other than that: you've got no pre-eclampsia, no gestational diabetes, only a single baby, he's not breech or transverse... Your, ah, **paternal** age isn't advanced... All things considered, this pregnancy is mostly low-risk."

"Hm." Desmond scanned further down the page. There were minimal words written, as most of the lines only contained various numerical measurements, until he came to an entry dated 03/12/87, which indicated that labor had commenced.

He blinked. "March **twelve**? I took a whole day to be born? Man. That must have sucked for Mom."

"Not a whole day." Stacey pointed to the time notation. "About twenty hours."

"Twenty hours is still a fucking long time! No wonder I don't have any siblings! She obviously never wanted to do that again!" He blanched at the thought of being in pain for twenty hours, then shouted down at his belly. "Hey, you! You better do like Rebecca said and come out quick and easy! Okay, I'm taking that kick to mean you're agreeing!"

"It's quite possible you'll have a rough time as well. Your anatomy-"

"Is fucked up, I know." He frowned. "That book says I should start prepping for the birth by now."

"Sounds like a good idea."

"Maybe, but it's running on the assumption that I'm not hiding out in a secret Assassin den! Stuff like 'make sure your hospital bag is packed', 'practice driving to the hospital', 'go to childbirth classes'. How is childbirth class even a thing? What the hell do they teach? Don't you just lie there and push 'til the kid's out?"

"You don't just push the entire time. Pushing before you're dilated won't do any good and can actually lead to injury."

"Oh. Right." Yeah, I did read something like "When you're all the way dilated, it's time to push". He felt a little stupid now.

"Okay, so the 'prepping' in the book won't fit our situation here, but we do need to talk about this, to have some sort of plan, so you don't just panic when it happens. Make sure you come tell me straight away if you feel anything that might be a contraction, or if you notice any liquid or whatnot coming out."

Desmond felt a little queasy at the mental image this last part brought on. "Yeah, yeah." To drive away the gross idea of mysterious birthing liquids coming out of him, he turned the page back to look at his baby picture again. "God, a baby... Here, with us, with the Assassins. Can you believe it?" He shook his head. "Shit's gonna be **crazy**."

"Yeah."

"So, uh... you ever gone through this? Can you give me any pointers?"

"No, I..." Stacey inhaled and exhaled deeply. "I can't have children."

"Oh..." It sounded like she'd wanted to. He considered asking "Why not?" but thought better of it. Most likely not something she wants to talk about. Instead he said, "Uh... you can have this one, if you want."

"Hmm. Pretty sure we're all going to help raise this one, regardless of who 'has' him."

"Good, 'cause I sure don't feel like I can do it on my own."

* * *

><p>May 31, 2013<p>

Desmond was lying on the couch in the library, his face buried in _A History of the World in 12 Maps_, but he wasn't really reading it. The hand that wasn't holding the book was on his stomach, and he was pondering what his kid's life would be like.

_Will he be okay with staying in the den all the time? I sure wasn't. Will he believe all this crazy Assassin shit? I sure didn't. Will I be okay with telling him he was born from me? Or should we pretend that Rebecca is his mom? I mean, she might be his mom, but not in the usual way. If his other parent is Lucy, will the other Assassins treat him weird because she betrayed us? If it's Shaun, will he inherit Shaun's antisocial nerdishness?_

"There you are!" He looked up to see Spencer. "I got a question about your Indian dude."

"My Indian dude?" Desmond repeated, miffed at the glib descriptor.

"Sorry, your Native American dude."

"He has a name, you know. Connor."

"**Had** a name."

"Sure, if you wanna get pedantic about it."

"Whatever! Anyway, he hunted game, right? Knew how to, like, field dress the kill and everything? So you know it too, right?"

Desmond put down his book. "We're going hunting now?"

"Don't tell Rebecca, she'll unleash her vegetarian wrath on us, but yeah. Food stores are running dangerously low."

"She knows we eat meat."

"Yeah but she doesn't react well to being reminded of it. Come on... Unless you're feeling too pregnant to go?"

"I'll be fine." Desmond got up from the couch, trying to maintain as manly a posture as possible. Even though his back did hurt, he consciously stopped himself from doing that stereotypical pregnant woman back rubbing thing. "Me and this little dude are probably the reason we're running out of food anyway."

The two of them went outside and selected a couple of rifles suitable to the task, then headed towards the metal fence that enclosed the Compound.

"Connor wasn't his real name, right?" Spencer said as he opened the gate. "Wasn't it like, Ra... something? Raterminian?"

"Ratonhnhaké:ton," Desmond supplied.

"Man, how do you remember that shit?"

"How do you remember **your** shitty name? I pretty much **was** him, or did you forget?"

"Hey, my name's not shitty."

"Neither is his."

"Touché."

"What are we hunting for?"

"This time'a year? Turkeys, most likely. But if we see something else that looks good I won't argue."

"All right, I'll try switching my Eagle Vision from 'Templar' mode to 'Turkey' mode."

Spencer's eyebrows jumped. "Aw, right! I forgot you had that. You're like the best hunting partner ever, man."


	20. Alojzy

June 1, 2013

As per usual these days, Desmond was awoken by the urgent need to urinate. _I've got a damn alarm clock for a bladder. Well, at least I can still piss standing up, even if I can't hardly see my dick anymore. Thank god for small mercies._

He scrounged around in his dresser for something to wear. That extra-large hoodie from Colin fit him well but it was too hot for that today. He finally found a polo and khakis that didn't feel too tight or look too stupid, then headed to breakfast.

"Morning, sunshine," chirped Colin.

Not feeling very sunshiny at all, Desmond grunted some semblance of a greeting back at him, got a plate and heaped it high with turkey bacon.

"How are you doing these past couple of days, Desmond?" William asked as he sat down.

"Fine, whatever. Just lemme eat."

"You're sure? No more contractions?"

"Shuddup already, or I'll contract **you**." That nonsensical reply set Colin on a giggling spree, but at least his father stopped pestering him.

Desmond paused in the middle of his meal to get something to drink. Upon opening the cupboard, he saw the dozen or so canisters of powdered formula arranged next to the glasses and mugs. He'd seen them before, of course, but the sight was still a little jarring.

_Another person. Before the summer is out, there's going to be another person hiding out with us. A tiny helpless person we have to take care of, teach, and protect._ This fact had hit him several times already, but the realization always seemed to fade away soon after, allowing him to almost forget the impending arrival, until the next reminder brought it forward again.

Those reminders were getting harder and harder to avoid: The formula in the cupboard. The crib in the corner of his room. The box of baby clothes next to it. Receiving unsolicited name suggestions from the other Assassins. Stacey calling him for another checkup. Washing his belly and feeling the kid move. Even the simple act of flipping his calendar page from May to June this morning had emphasized that July, the month containing his due date, was coming up next.

Desmond retrieved a glass and poured himself some orange juice. Not for the first time, and not for the last either, he mused silently on the irony of an Assassin bringing forth life instead of ending it.

* * *

><p>"Good news, Desmond, your session the other day wasn't a complete waste of time."<p>

He goggled at her. "You can't possibly mean I actually managed to sync with someone while all that shit was going on?"

Rebecca nodded happily. "A couple of people actually."

"You're **kidding**! I know it was going super fast, but I didn't think I was in there that long!"

"About seven minutes."

"Seven minutes in hell." He laughed wryly. "So where are we now? Or when, rather?"

"Early 1800s." She swiveled her monitor so Desmond could see it, and pointed out his progress on the "Ancestral Pathway Overview" screen. "Isidor didn't live very long, so you were able to skip him entirely. Those seven minutes in hell got you through all the major nexes of Jakob and partway through this guy." She indicated a branch labeled "Alojzy".

Desmond squinted at the letters. "How do you pronounce that? A-lodge-zee?"

She shrugged. "Why do you think I called him 'this guy' just now? I only saw it written."

He scratched his head. "How did you even get their names, when even I couldn't tell whose memories they were?"

"The session recording, after decelerating it by several orders of magnitude. I didn't watch the whole thing, though, just enough to get names to label the family tree with, and check if anything was relevant to our interests."

"Uh... 'relevant to our-' Oh! Right! Pieces of Eden et cetera." Desmond laughed.

"What, you forgot that's what the Animus is usually used for?"

He exhaled and adjusted his pillow. "I'm a little scatterbrained lately. Sorry."

"You wanna hold off on getting back to the past right away? Take a few more days to get your head together?"

"Don't think the Animus has anything to do with it. It's just... all'a this." Desmond gestured down at himself. "It's still really hard to wrap my mind around what's happened. What's going to happen."

Rebecca nodded sagely but didn't say anything.

"I mean... on one hand, I hate having to go through this 'cause it's so incredibly fucked up... But on the other hand, I feel like..." He shook his head. "Ugh, I don't even know how to describe it."

"Excited?"

He snorted. "I wouldn't go **that** far. It's more like... God, how can I explain this?" Desmond began to absentmindedly rub his stomach. "Back in New York, before this all started... I always liked meeting new and interesting people. That was one of the perks of bartending. And now... Now, I guess I'm curious to meet this guy. To find out what kind of person he'll be." A ripple of thought crossed over his face. "But I guess that'll be up to me, won't it? Since I'm..." Here his voice cracked. "I'm his dad... Whether I like it or not, I'm his dad."

The word 'dad', heavy with responsibility, sunk into the consciousness of the two young Assassins.

Rebecca tried to lighten the mood. "You know, it actually might be kind of fun having a little kid around."

"It might be." Desmond squeezed his eyes shut, stopped rubbing, and groaned. "Fuuuuck! What the hell is happening to me, Rebecca!? Did I really just say it would be **fun**? This is so totally **not fun**! Pregnancy is not '**fun**', birth will most definitely not be '**fun**', and taking care of a baby won't be '**fun**' either! That was **not** me, that was just the stupid hormones talking!" He thrust his head back into the scanner. "Let's do this shit already so I know who to blame. Gotta make up for lost time."

The loading screen dissolved away into a featureless gray for the briefest of moments before the ancestor's eyes shot open. But Desmond was unable to take in his surroundings, as a blistering heat seared through his right forearm, terrifyingly reminiscent of activating the Eye in the Grand Temple. Understandably, this freaked him the fuck out and he immediately quit the Animus. "What the hell, Rebecca?! You said you fixed it!"

"What? What happened?"

"Oh, nothing much, except **my fucking arm was on fire!**" He waved said arm in the air for emphasis. "Put it back on the crazy barf-inducing setting that makes all my words have Z's in them, if this is the alternative!"

She typed confusedly for a minute or so. "Uh... That... doesn't look like it's anything on my end. It must be part of the memory."

Desmond made a low guttural sound of resignation. "Gggh... I guess I gotta suffer through it, then."

"Could be good practice."

He cracked a smile despite himself. "Heh. Yeah. I needa be able to deal with pain for when my kid comes."

"And he's coming up pretty soon, right?"

"In about six more weeks." Desmond gulped. "Damn. I so fucking can't believe it."

"It's pretty unbelievable to the rest of us too."

"Yeah, well... We got all the evidence we need to prove it's actually happening, don't we?"

"Yep. Oh, by the way, this guy- however you say his name- he's in Poland."

"Poland. So that was Polish I was speaking and thinking and writing the other day."

"Shit, you were thinking and writing it too?"

"Yeah. And I couldn't understand any of it. Well, guess I'll get back to Poland. Time's a-wasting." He restarted the memory, this time bracing himself. The agony was still almost unconceivably powerful, but it lessened a bit once the ancestor sat upright in his bed, apparently roused from some horrid nightmare.

The woman beside him had just awakened as well, but Desmond wasn't paying any attention to her. Instead, he was staring openmouthed at his right arm.

Which he **didn't have.**

Although Desmond had definitely intended to say "Christ on a cracker!", the Animus must have put the shocked exclamation through some sort of filter before it came out of the ancestor's mouth, because the phrase that was ultimately verbalized as he tightly gripped the remnant of his elbow was "Lord Almighty!"

"Another phantom pain, Alojzy?" Desmond took note of the pronounciation: _Ah-loy-zuh. Kinda like Elijah, almost._

"Ahhh..." he answered with a slight nod, rubbing at the afflicted area, careful to avoid the rough scars that crisscrossed it. "The damnable Russians are still putting me through misery, though the war is long ended. How much longer am I to suffer these pains, Magda?"

"Shall I send for Doctor Jelen again?"

Alojzy massaged the ache away as best he could. "You shan't. It wouldn't be right to rouse him and call him from his residence at this hour of the night. Not for such a triviality as this. At any rate, the pain has lessened now. A Żubrówka usually suffices to chase it away completely." The man stood up and went to the next room, the kitchen, and retrieved a squat glass bottle from a shelf. _Aw, awesome! I've been needing a drink!_ thought Desmond.

The amputation must have occurred some time ago, for Alojzy was able to open the bottle rapidly with no difficulty at all, gripping it semi-upright between chest and stump and twisting the cork out with his left hand as if he'd done it a thousand times. "Żubrówka" turned out to be a sort of dry vodka, and an interesting one at that. _Sort of nutty and vanilla-y... definitely several steps above Smirnoff._ Sure enough, the burning sensation diminished as he drank.

Magda had followed him in, and began to sensuously caress his bare shoulders. She leaned down to whisper in his ear. "You know, Żubrówka is far from the only way to chase away troubles."

Alojzy turned his head and gazed into her smoldering eyes. Desmond's peripheral vision noticed the thin nightshirt she wore. _Shit, forget her eyes, man, check out those tits!_ The ancestor stood up and embraced his... well, Desmond assumed Magda was his wife, but he didn't really give a rat's ass who she was exactly, because she was hot as hell and totally down to fuck.

And for once, the Animus didn't skip over the good parts. Desmond thrilled at the touch of her breasts, at the heady smell of her arousal, at the warmth of her mouth and the teasing skillfulness of her fingers. He feared he would cum prematurely and bring the fun to a close, but luckily it wasn't actually his body being pleasured. Alojzy had far more stamina than Desmond did in his current sex-deprived, hormone-addled state.

When the ancestor was finally thrusting inside Magda's hot depths, Desmond began to feel a peculiar sensation. It was as if he was being withdrawn from the person he was reliving. _Fuck, no, Rebecca! Don't you **dare** pull me out of the Animus before I get to experience the grand finale!_

But he didn't exit the memory. He was still there, in that dimly-lit room with Alojzy and Magda. But he...

"Oh god!" The ancestor cried out his climax, echoing Desmond's thoughts as his senses shifted in a bizarre and familiar way and he realized why the entirety of this sex session was important for synchronization. _Oh god! He's... he's passing on his genes. I'm a sperm again._

The Animus chimed and Desmond groaned as he felt his surroundings reform into the world where he was a pregnant man instead of being inside a pregnant woman.

He could hear the smirk in Rebecca's voice. "Too hot to handle, huh?"

"Ughh... that's the third time that's happened to me!"

"Really? I don't recall you ever jizzing your pants in the Animus before."

Desmond was suddenly aware of the uncomfortable sticky wetness in his boxers. "Fuck."

"Al and Maggie already did."

"God, shut up!" he barked in furious embarrassment. _Hell, Rebecca just watched me getting off to my kid's ancestors. As if getting shot out of a dick wasn't awkward enough already. I guess I should just be thankful this didn't happen with Haytham and Ziio. Shaun woulda never let me live it down, woulda made it into some fucking running joke about me having secret incestuous fantasies._

"Hey, I can't blame you, those two went at it like pros! I was getting hot and bothered too, and I wasn't the one reliving it! Forget anti-Assassin propaganda, Abstergo should make their next game a porn sim!"


	21. Wonder

Desmond quickly escaped Rebecca's workroom to change clothes, and returned just as quickly afterwards, demanding she swear an oath of secrecy about his Animus-induced ejaculation.

"Don't be so ashamed, bud," she said in response. "Just think of that memory as basically a hyper-realistic wet dream. You've been pretty stressed lately, I think you needed some release."

He scrunched his hands in the pockets of his robe, barely able to talk to her, much less make eye contact. "Maybe I did need it, okay!? Didn't need you to **watch it happen** though!"

"C'mon, it's a natural physiological process. I'm not gonna get all weird about it, so you don't need to either." But in the end she did agree not to tell anyone.

"So did you want to keep going today?" she asked as he sat down on the Animus chair to give his swollen feet a rest. "You weren't in there more than forty minutes."

"I... well... maybe? Is the next memory from inside Magda's uterus?" he asked, placing a hand over his own. "Don't know if I could handle that right now."

Rebecca shrugged. "I can't see 'em before you sync 'em."

Desmond closed his eyes and grimaced, rubbing his hand back and forth.

"Oh, is he kicking? Like, showing you he knows you're talking about babies and uteri?"

"No... I... I'm just thinking about him... being born." He stuck out his tongue. "Gross."

"That'll be far from the grossest thing you'll have to deal with. You ever changed a diaper before?"

"Gaaagh!" He frantically shook his head, both to indicate "No" to her question and to try to expunge the nasty mental image it had prompted.

"Shit happens, y'know. Literally."

He looked at the floor. "Can we not talk about that right now?!"

"It'll happen whether you talk about it or not, but fine." She shrugged again and focused back on her screen. "Well, obviously that night of Polish passion was the last memory recorded from Alojzy's life. So, including the one we just saw the conception of, there are one, two, three, four,**five** ancestors before we're down to Junior himself."

A thought popped in Desmond's brain and he sat up abruptly. "Hey Becca, you've been in the Animus, right?"

"Yeah, but just briefly, for testing purposes. I only relived one ancestor." Her chair creaked as she idly tilted it back and forth. "Someday I wanna get back in and find out if the famous Ichabod Crane is really in my family tree. My granddad swears he was, but that guy was a little kooky sometimes; it coulda been just another one of his tall tales."

"Was your ancestor in Italy, Austria, Germany, or Poland?" He felt incredibly stupid for not thinking to ask this sooner.

"Prussia. That was part of Germany, right? I think? Ask Shaun or Colin, they'd know."

"Was his or her name Schreiber?"

Rebecca chuckled and shook her head. "I know what you're getting at. But just because the one guy I synced wasn't a Schreiber doesn't mean Junior couldn't be mine. The number of ancestral pathway branches increases exponentially with each generation back in time. So** if** I'm the unwitting DNA donor for Junior, the branch with my Karl von Pöhlmann in it is a completely different one from this Carlo Poletti line we're exploring."

"So... there's no way to know." Desmond hunched over in defeat.

"Not until you sync close enough to the present that we can recognize a family member. Buck up, you'll be getting to that point pretty soon." She snapped her fingers. "Oh, forgot to tell you. I added an IM feature."

He looked up. "Huh? What for?"

"Usually when you're in a memory, you're able to talk with your actual Desmond mouth, but the other day with the new synchro config, you had some paralysis going on, remember? I bet you were trying to yell out for me to help you or something but you couldn't."

Desmond nodded. "Right, I was trying to tell you everything was all fucked."

"Well, now you'll be able to send telepathic texts to my end of the system, if you need to. And I can type back at'cha. And it'll be saved to a log in case we need to reference our chit-chat later."

"Oh. Nice."

"So, let's move along to Maggie's kid. Maybe you're in her uterus now, maybe not," Rebecca made an ambivalent see-saw gesture with her hands, "but really, would it be so bad to learn how Junior spends his days?"

His eyes lit up with realization. "Oh. I hadn't thought of it that way."

"How the hell could you **not** think of it that way?"

He chuckled. "Honestly, all I was thinking of was how weird it felt when I was Connor inside Ziio."

"Come on, we eat 'weird' for breakfast."

There was a strange grumbling sound from Desmond's gut. "Speaking of eating," he began, but Rebecca cut him off, saying "Didn't you just **have**breakfast before syncing Alojzy?"

"You've clearly never been pregnant." He gesticulated at different spots on his torso. "Kid's taking up all the real estate from here to here, so my stomach's all cramped up in this tiny space right under my ribs, so I can't fit a lot of food in there... Plus he eats from what I eat, so I gotta up my intake. Put those two together, **obviously** I gotta eat more often than normal!"

"Right, right," she acknowledged. "Go get your grub on, for Junior's sake. Hey, you been having any crazy cravings?"

He stood and shook his head. "Sorry to disappoint. Just craving straight-up **food**."

* * *

><p>Desmond was so food-focused that he didn't notice the other person in the kitchen until he heard a click from behind him while rooting in the fridge. He almost banged his head snapping to attention and spinning around to locate the sound's origin.<p>

"The hell?! Colin, is that a **camera**?! You took a **picture** of me like this!?"

"Affirmatory," the scruffy blonde answered. "It's important to capture mementos of this brief and magical time."

_Not brief enough!_ Desmond thought. "I don't need any mementos! It's not like I'll forget this shit happened to me, so you can just delete that!"

"Can't delete it. It's Polaroid." Colin held up a square of plastic.

Desmond was incredulous. "Polaroid? Who still uses Polaroid in the year twenty-fucking-thirteen?"

"Digital cameras have all that digital garf in 'em. GPS, social media integration, who knows what else besides. Too much of a security risk if the data was ever accessed by you-know-who."

"Whatever, just give it here," Desmond grabbed the photo from the younger Assassin and watched the image resolve. "This picture sucks balls," he opined. "All you can see is my back. Can't even tell I'm pregnant from that angle. Kinda defeats your whole 'memento' purpose, doesn't it?" He tossed it down and resumed his search for a snack.

Colin held the viewfinder to his eye and affected a campy semi-British, semi-Australian accent. "Roight, give us a pose then, luv."

"Take pictures if you must, but they'll hafta be candid snaps, I'm not posing." He happened to look up from building his sandwich just in time to get a faceful of flash as the camera went off. "Gah!"

"Whoops, bad timing on that one."

Desmond blinked spots from his vision. "If any of these preggo pics end up on the Assassin database, you're so fucking dead."

* * *

><p>He did indeed have to relive the prenatal life of the next ancestor. Floating in warm fluid, all curled up, not even able to open his eyes, the steady thumping of Magda's heartbeat somewhere above him the only sound he could identify; Desmond supposed he would have considered it boring, if not for the fact of his pregnancy making the experience relevant to his own life.<p>

He whiled away the time testing the limits of fetal motion, extending one leg, then the other, first slowly, then faster, then repeating the process with his arms, then turning his head side to side, back and forth. Whenever he bumped against the uterus, it would shift slightly as Magda reacted to feeling her baby move. Sometimes she responded with laughter, and Desmond was slightly saddened, as the sound reminded him of his own mother. _Man, what would she think if she was here? If she had to watch her son being pregnant? I guess she probably wanted grandkids just like every other mother does... Oh geez. My Dad's going to be a granddad. I wonder how he feels about that... Did he ever even think about me having kids? If I had stayed at the Farm, would he have set me up with some nice Assassin girl? What if I'd gotten married after I left? Would Abstergo have come after my wife and kids?_

He shook his head, or rather, the baby's head. _Why am I even thinking about this?! I **did** run away, and I **didn't** get married! The Desmond that became a bartender in New York was the one the First Civ needed; none of the other Desmonds are relevant... Do they even **exist**? In some parallel universe? Or are they nothing more than possibilities I could have chosen, alternate paths I could have taken?_

Thinking of Those Who Came Before made him wonder, for about the majillionth time, why exactly Juno had impregnated him. _If she wanted to have a body again, surely she wouldn't have used human DNA to make it? She was always going on and on about how inferior humans are. So my kid definitely isn't her. But then **why**? Gee, I guess if we ever run into her again, I'll have to ask._

Somehow, Desmond realized he could now open his eyes, and he looked down at the body he was inhabiting, though he could barely see anything. Only the barest hint of light was available to him, most of it filtered out by Magda's clothing, skin, and uterine walls. But he tried anyway. _So... this is what my kid looks like._ He regarded the chubby form, and felt a tingle of some strange emotion he couldn't quite put a name to. _That there must be the uh, umbilical cord._ He followed the meandering string of vessels outward from his navel, and found an alien-looking blob of tissue. _And that's the uh... doohickey. Mental note: re-read that dumb pregnancy book. Wait, no. It doesn't matter what it's called. What matters is how it works, and I remember that much. It's the thingy that'll come out after he comes out. It connects him to me and it's how he gets all his blood and food and stuff... Heh, I guess he technically is a parasite, when you think about it._

From time to time he was semi-aware of Magda's conversations and activities. _I wonder how far along she is? Is she close to giving birth? Do I have to relive that part too? What about breastfeeding? God, that'd be weird. Ah, don't start thinking about boobs, Desmond, you'll get another boner!_

As he tried to push the thought of breasts from his mind, the ancestral child did a strange rapid half somersault, and Magda's heartbeat was below him now. _Hold up, no, her heart is still above me. I'm just upside-down now._ He remembered Stacey's explanation of his kid's position. _Yeah. Because babies come out head first... Oh crap. A baby is really going to **come out of me.** Ugh._

* * *

><p>June 2, 2013<p>

Either due to Rebecca's modifications or to the natural quirkiness of the Animus, the next genetic memory after the one in utero was the ancestor as a teenaged boy.

Desmond felt goosebumps rise on his skin as the simulation loaded. The winter was harsh in Poland, even though he was curled beneath heavy feather blankets. He didn't want to move from this spot of comfort and relative warmth, but he could sense that each minute he stayed in bed was chipping away at his synchronization level. _Guess this guy was an early bird._ Desmond finally allowed the ancestor to rise and begin his day.

He prepared a mug of coffee, which tasted terrible and had way too many grounds in it, but at least heated him up. Then, after donning a thick woolen overgarment and boots, he headed outside and tromped crunchily through the snow.

_So, he's a farmer_, Desmond realized when he came to a barn. He heaved his weight against the doors to open them, revealing bleating livestock inside. _That's why he had to get up so early._ The ancestor pulled a stool and bucket over to one of the cows and began to milk it. _Oh, this is familiar. I've done this on the Farm, and now I'm doing it on a real farm. Heh._

But something felt... off. Something Desmond couldn't quite put his finger on. He hazarded a try at the newly-added IM feature. _She said it was 'telepathic'... so I guess I just need to **think** something to her. Rebecca? You there?_

He was startled to see the words appear in his vision, superimposed on the cow's spotted hide and formatted like an internet chat room.

**Desmond: Rebecca? You there?**

Then a reply popped under it.

**Rebecca: w00t! it works!**

He mentally aimed some more words at her.

**Desmond: This feels weird.**

**Rebecca: yeah i bet thought to text is pretty trippy right?**

**Desmond: I mean the memory feels weird.**

**Rebecca: what, milking a cow is weird?**

**Desmond: Not that. It's hard to describe.**

**Rebecca: try me.**

The initial lines of their conversation faded away as more recent ones took their place.

**Desmond: It's like my- No, his body feels unusual.**

**Rebecca: ? you can still feel jr inside you? you shouldnt be getting any tactile stimuli other than fom the memory**

**Desmond: Not my kid's body, this farmer guy's body.**

**Rebecca: ? oh i get it lol**

**Desmond: Huh?**

**Rebecca: u're not reliving a farmer guy**

**Desmond: Excuse me?**

**Rebecca: i guess the reason you feel wierd is becus this ancestor's female lol**

Desmond looked down at "himself". "He" had breasts, albeit small ones.

**Desmond: Oh. Yeah. That could explain it. Why the hell didn't I notice that before?**

**Rebecca: guess you assumed you would only ever be synced with dudes? check ur male privelege bud, baby is fully capble of simulating womans' lifes**

**Rebecca: gender of teh user dosnt matter, ive synced a guy b4, remeber?**

**Desmond: Speaking of checking things, you should check your spelling.**

**Rebecca: tushe**

**Desmond: What? Was that supposed to be "touché"? Case in point.**

**Rebecca: soz! ur messages are coming in so fast im just tryina keep up!**

**Rebecca: u just haveto think it and it sends what u think, but im havin t tpye everythin out n also monitoer your sycnh n vitals at the same time!**

**Desmond: Okay, all right! Don't worry about replying to me then, if it's distracting from your monitoring duties. I just wanted to check that nothing was going screwy with the Animus.**

**Rebecca: nope nothin screwy, this is just wat it fels like for a girl**

**Desmond: God, Shaun would have an aneurysm if he saw the way you type.**


	22. Revelations

June 3, 2013

Desmond unfolded the letter his son's ancestor had just received.

**Rebecca: has the animus taught u to read polish yet? what does it say?**

**Desmond: Gimme a minute.**

He felt her heart beat faster and her skin grow slightly flushed as she ran her fingers lovingly over the script.

_Aniela moja droga_

_Aniela moja ukochana_

_Dałeś mi dni pełne radości_

_Dałeś mi noce pełne przyjemności_

**Desmond: It's a poem.**

**Rebecca: well duh**

**Desmond: Let's see if I can make it rhyme in English.**

"Oh, Piotr..." Aniela breathed, reading and rereading the lines on the small scrap of paper.

**Desmond: Something like, Aniela my dear, Aniela my treasure, You fill my days with cheer, You fill my nights with pleasure.**

**Rebecca: ooh, that's nice**

**Rebecca: ur a good translatr**

**Rebecca: think we'll get to see some of those pleasurable nites?**

**Desmond: I hope not! I really don't think I'd enjoy reliving sex from the female side of things!**

Aniela turned the paper over. There was another message on the back.

**Rebecca: what's this?**

**Desmond: Um...**

**Desmond: Piotr's gonna come visit her before Gromniczna, whatever that is.**

**Desmond: And she's the only one for him, he thinks of her all the time, yadda yadda, sappy romance tripe.**

"Another letter from Piotr?" Magda asked as she entered the kitchen. "When will that man ask to marry you already?"

"Mama, I believe he is planning to!" Aniela answered excitedly. "See here!" She held up the letter.

"Ah." Magda smiled. "Yes, it does appear so. You are fortunate to have found such a gentleman. Lidka," she turned and addressed a younger girl who had just appeared in the doorway. "Do you remember Piotr? He shall ask for your sister's hand soon!"

Spencer watched the feed, an odd expression on his face. "So this is what he does all day?"

"Not all day. Three hours a session, one, sometimes two sessions a day."

"Whatever, you know what I mean."

Rebecca looked up at him. "Penny for your thoughts?"

"It's just so boring. I feel like I'm watching a soap opera. Woo, somebody's getting married, who cares."

"Well not everyone in history led the exciting life of an Assassin. Oh, speaking of which, you grew up on the Farm. What's life like for little kidsassins?"

Spencer tilted his head back and pondered the question a moment. "Guess if I had to sum it up in one word... it'd be 'busy'. Really busy. Always stuff to do, like training, studying, various chores. Not a lot of downtime." He looked back at Rebecca. "But maybe that's how normal kids live too. It's not like I have anything to compare against."

"Hm..."

"Hey, check it out! When she runs, his legs twitch!" Spencer pointed gleefully. "Just like a dog dreaming of chasing cars! Hah!"

"Yeah, that happens sometimes, the micro-movements of the muscle fibers sometimes team up and turn into macro-movements." Her tone changed suddenly from neutral to excited. "Ooh, I been meaning to ask. You wanna help me throw a baby shower?"

Spencer looked dubious. "Um... You think Desmond would want that?"

Rebecca half-smirked. "C'mon, why wouldn't he? Everyone likes an excuse to party."

"Won't he think it's... what's the word... y'know, demasculating? Effeminate?"

"Maybe," she shrugged. "But so's pregnancy, and he seems to have gotten to a place where he's more or less okay with that."

"Baby showering him might be a bridge too far, though... What exactly goes on at a baby shower anyway?"

"Well there's presents obviously, and baby-related games and stuff."

"Baby-related games?" Spencer questioned. "Like what, pin the tail on the baby?"

"Like, guess the baby's weight, match baby photos to adult people, things like that."

"Hm. And what exactly kind of presents were you thinking of? He's already got a crib and plenty of clothes," Spencer pointed out. "What else could he need?"

"I was thinking a stroller."

Spencer suppressed a laugh. "I can't really imagine Desmond pushing a stroller around. And it's not like he'll be taking his kid anywhere anyway."

"Fine, stroller's out. What about a high chair, changing table, stuff like that?"

"Ag, more furniture to make. Just great. Whatever, you can throw a baby shower if you want, but if Desmond gets pissed off by it, remember it was your idea, not anybody else's."

* * *

><p>June 4, 2013<p>

"Aniela!" The ancestor looked up at the voice, which Desmond recognized as her father. "Come, I need your help!" She began heading toward Alojzy, who was kneeling on the ground next to a heaving mass of fur that was a cow in some sort of distress.

"What is it, papa?"

"Nina's having trouble."

Desmond saw the nature of the distress. The cow was in mid-labor. _Aw crap. First the uterus memory, and now this. It's like the Animus knows I'm pregnant and doesn't want me forgetting it._

"You need to reach in with those slender hands of yours and reposition the calf," Alojzy said as he stroked the cow's head, attempting to keep her calm.

_Reach into a cow cunt?_ "Do I really truly need to?" Desmond said through Aniela's mouth, and his synchronization weakened slightly at the sentence, which was different than the reply she'd historically given.

"Someone needs to! Else we'll lose both Nina and her calf!" Alojzy answered sharply. "And it is a two-handed job!" He waved his stump in the air for emphasis.

Desmond looked down in apprehension at what was going on. At the rear of the huge animal, two spindly **things**- _legs, I suppose_- were emerging from a grotesquely swollen orifice. The hay beneath it was soaked with various bodily fluids. He averted his eyes from the slimy spectacle and messaged Rebecca.

**Desmond: Any way I can skip over this part?**

**Rebecca: grin and bear it, bud**

**Rebecca: consider it part of ur prenatel education**

**Desmond: I am not a goddamn cow!**

**Rebecca: u've got the same parts, right?**

**Rebecca: so it's the same basic concept isn't it?**

**Desmond: Fuck you.**

He punctuated this with a middle finger to the sky, feeling a significant drop in synch as he did so.

**Rebecca: stop ur bitching and help the poor widdle caffie outta there, annie**

The heifer mooed plaintively, a sound that shook Desmond to his very core, and his mother's unpleasantly prolonged labor floated to the forefront of his mind. He gritted his teeth and pushed up the ancestor's sleeves, sat down on the moist hay, and slid one arm, then the other into the mucusy mess. _No fucking clue what I'm supposed to do in here, but whatever it is I hope it doesn't take too long, this shit is nasty!_

Luckily, Aniela's genetic memories took control of the action from that point. Her hands felt around inside the slippery canal and located the calf's head, which was bent at an odd angle. She pushed the legs inward a bit, adjusted the head, then took hold of the shoulders and tugged gently. The calf began to slide out into the world. Desmond found himself with a ghastly vision in his head, of something similar going wrong at his kid's delivery, and someone having to reach their hands inside **him**. _Shit no! That's not going to happen, I won't let it happen, he's gonna come nice and quick and easy, nice and quick and easy, nice and quick and easy..._ He repeated the mental mantra ad nauseam.

"Good girl, there's a good girl," Alojzy was saying. Whether he was addressing his daughter or the cow was unclear. Steam rose as the warm body was birthed into frigid air. Desmond was trying not to watch, but somehow he couldn't tear his eyes away.

The calf suddenly shot out, and Aniela fell backwards. It was done. The two farmhands brought the newborn around to its mother's head and _Oh gross, she's licking it! It just came out of her and it's covered in blood and shit and she's **licking it!**_

**Rebecca: sorry to interrupt the miracle, but bill wants everyone in the war room pronto**

**Desmond: Anything to get me out of here!**

* * *

><p>"I've called you all here because there's a situation brewing. Simmering. Let's just hope it doesn't boil over." William's speech was severe as always. "One of our people in Hong Kong has just made contact with a whistleblower, an erstwhile NSA employee calling himself 'Verax'."<p>

"Ah. Truth-teller," Colin said, a slight upward curve in one corner of his mouth.

William's expression remained cheerless. "And a very unwelcome truth he tells. It's as I've suspected. The Templars have enacted a Panopticon."

The curve of Colin's mouth reversed itself into consternation. Shaun appeared dismayed as well.

"Uhh," Spencer began.

Shaun shot him one of his oh-my-god-I-can't-believe-how-ignorant-you-are looks and explained. "The Panopticon. A supposedly 'ideal' prison building dreamed up by Jeremy Bentham, designed so that a single warden can observe every inmate at once."

"And, importantly, they remain unaware of this observation," added Colin. "The concept was meant as 'a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind', according to Bentham." He rubbed his chin. "I always thought it odd that he'd envision something like that as something to strive for, given that he was quite the critic of excessive power."

"You're conveniently forgetting that the man didn't value privacy at all," Shaun replied casually. "He wanted complete and utter transparency, enforced on everyone, whether king or commoner. That was his idea of utopia: all surveillance, no secrets." The historian looked back up at William. "You said NSA?"

He nodded gravely. "NSA, GCHQ, various other agencies that act as fronts for the Order. They've got it set up so they can read every email, every text, every search query that goes out over pretty much any network worldwide. GPS coordinates, uploads, downloads: for some years now, it's all been going into their databanks."

"Holy fuck, we're fucked!" Desmond yelped.

Rebecca grabbed his shoulder. "Geez, don't blow a gasket!"

He shook her off. "You heard what he said, they've got all of our communications! It's a miracle we're not already dead!"

"I'm sure they weren't able to tap into any Assassin networks," she said, then looked up for confirmation. "They weren't, right?"

Their leader blew out a breath. "I'm **tentatively** assuming that our data hasn't been breached, since it's true 'we're not already dead'. But it's a sure bet that they're working on it. So we've got to make damn sure our shit is secure. Yes, we all think it's secure already, but we've got to see that security raised exponentially in light of these revelations."

Everyone nodded their assent.

"Now, as for Verax, Laura's going to lend him the protection of our Hong Kong branch." He closed his eyes. "Let's just hope that will be enough. He'll be wanted by every government in the world. They'll stop at nothing to cover up what he's trying to reveal."

"So, what's our mission?" hazarded Rebecca.

The Mentor sighed. "No mission. At this point, there's nothing we can do. Not from this location at any rate. The nature of the situation precludes any details being sent long-distance. I only mentioned it since it could escalate rapidly, depending how Laura et al handle it. Verax wants to disclose the surveillance to the news media. If this goes public, the Templars might react by flying into full-on New World Order mode; imposing their martial law on a worldwide scale."

"Brilliant," Shaun said. "I was just hankering for another global crisis, since that whole sun business's been over for a while. How's this going to affect the Abstergo Entertainment operation?"

"It shouldn't," William answered, though he didn't sound as certain as he usually did. "As long as we can keep our communications secure, the operation will go ahead with no alterations."

"Hold up," Rebecca asked. "You said there's Assassins in Montreal, right? So why is Shaun being pulled from Vermont for this?"

"Precautionary principle. The members of the Montreal den... if they're clocked as Assassins, they'd have to get out of town. We're already out of town so it'd be less of a hassle, shall we say. This is the next closest den." He stood up. "Anyone have any further business before we adjourn?"

"Uh. I have something," Desmond said with a slight quaver in his voice. The other six Assassins turned to fix their gaze on him.

"Yes? What is it?"

Desmond rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, it's not as important as this Verax thing, but while we've got everyone together here I might as well mention it..."

"What is it?" William repeated insistently.

"It's about... my kid."

"La-la-la!" Shaun shut his eyes and covered his ears. "I don't want to hear this!"

"Can it, Hastings," William said, giving him a light smack on the back of his head. "Let him talk."

"I'm, uh... " Desmond crossed his arms over his belly in a sort of semi-hug, not exactly sure why this posture comforted him, giving him the confidence to continue the topic. "There's, uh... I don't have that many more generations left in the Animus before... before I'm gonna find out his other parent."

There was an awkward silence... a pregnant pause, one might say, if one was inclined to wordplay.

"Rebecca. Shaun." He looked toward the two of them. "It's probably one of you. Or Lucy. Since you three were there... when this happened. And I... well..." Desmond's palms were sweaty, and he wiped them on his pants. "Well, obviously you didn't have any more choice in the matter than I did. So don't think I'm expecting you to do anything special just 'cause Juno picked your genes to mix with mine. No matter who it is, I don't want things to get weird between us once we find out, okay?"

"Look, Desmond," Shaun said, face down on the table, his head covered by his arms, "no matter what we do, no matter whose sprog it is, things are going to be weird! Can we change the subject, please?! I want to enjoy the precious little time remaining wherein I can pretend it's not happening!"

Rebecca guffawed. "God, Shaun, you're such a wuss! You've known he was pregnant for what, two months now? And you're **still** all totally squicked out about it!"

He lifted one arm to shoot her a look. "Beg pardon? I'm **what** about it?"

"Squicked. C'mon, it's a perfectly cromulent word."

"Fine, I admit it, I'm 'squicked' or whatever! Honestly, it boggles my mind how the rest of you are able to take this in such stride! Have you forgotten he's supposed to be **male**!?"

"I'm still male!" "He's still male!" Desmond and Stacey asserted concurrently.

"No, technically, you're some hermaphroditic aberration!"

In an instant, Desmond stood up from his seat and leaned menacingly across the table, eyes blazing. "Say that again. I fucking dare you."

"Shaun! That was uncalled for," William reprimanded.

"Yeah, who pissed in your tea this morning?" Spencer said, scowling. "He's a dude, he's pregnant, yeah it's freaky, but come on and get over it already. Personally I think this Templar spy shit is way, way more fucked up than anything Desmond has going on!"

* * *

><p>June 5, 2013<p>

It was another cold night in Poland, but the chill was mitigated somewhat by the candles in the center of the small table, and by the emanating body heat of four other people sitting there.

Desmond recognized two of them as Magda and Alojzy, of course, but not the other two. One was a man appearing perhaps twenty years old, and the other much older, gray and wizened. The younger offered Aniela an ornate bottle of vodka wrapped with red ribbon. She took it and poured herself a glass. Her hands shook slightly as she sipped briefly, and then extended her arm and held the glass to the young man, who took a drink as the others smiled.

"So it is settled!" the old man said jovially. "Aniela Plebańska will be wed to Piotr Kaczmarek."

Desmond was so shocked by the suitor's surname that he-as-Aniela dropped the bottle. Glass fragments shattered across the floor, mirroring the way the memory fractured into shards as he quit out from the Animus.

"What the holy fuck?!" he yelled. "Kaczmarek? No way! No goddamn way! Fucking impossible!"

"More impossible than the whole concept of a pregnant man?" Rebecca asked rhetorically.

Desmond stood up and began to pace back and forth. "But he's dead! He's been dead like a whole year! He and his genes sure as hell weren't anywhere near me when that Apple stuff happened!" Fueled by pure disbelief, his hands waved wildly through the air. "I only ever met him as a computer program! Computer programs don't have sperms or genes! There's **no way** I'm having his kid! No fucking way! That memory's gotta be wrong, that name's gotta be a coincidence or something, maybe Kaczmarek is the Polish version of Smith, or maybe there's some crazy glitch in the Animus!"

_In the Animus._

He froze for a second as it suddenly hit him how this might actually be possible, then quickly resumed talking, even more frantic than before. "Holy shit, Rebecca! He programmed his whole self into the Animus. Including his DNA. And then he, he did that thing, gave me all his memories. That's gotta be it, that's how it happened! When he did that, somehow his DNA got mixed up with mine and made this!" Desmond gestured at the pregnancy jutting from under his t-shirt.

Then a further possible wrinkle occurred to him and his eyes bugged out. "Oh my god... He wanted out of there! He asked me to take him with me! Maybe he knew this would happen, **wanted** it to happen! Maybe this wasn't a side effect of saving me from being deleted, maybe he lied and I wasn't even going to be deleted at all! Maybe this kid is his **clone**!"

Rebecca tilted her head. "I can't tell whether you're angry at him or not."

"Augh." Desmond sat back down at last and rubbed his head. "I'm more confused than anything else... Can't really be angry at a dead man, or angry at his ghost for trying to resurrect himself somehow... Christ, as if my life needed any more fucking plot twists."

"Wait wait wait, hold up," Rebecca made a time out sign with her hands. "Does this mean it started **after** October 10? Do we need to revise your due date? If Junior was made at the end of your coma, and not the beginning like we thought..."

Desmond grimaced. "Then he'll be in me for a whole 'nother week. Ugh."

"C'mon," she tried to console him, "one more week isn't that bad."

"Says someone who isn't pregnant!" he grumped. "I kinda wish I really **was** in labor that other day, 'cuz he woulda been smaller. The longer he's in there before coming out, the bigger he gets, and you know what that means."

She rolled her eyes. "Pff, that's dumb. Think about it. He's not really gonna be in there for an extra week. It's the same length of time as before, but it just started later."

"Look Becca, all this time I thought he was coming July 17, and now I find out it might be July 24 instead? Sure sounds like a fucking extra week. Maybe it's not an extra week to **him**, but it sure as hell's an extra week to **me**. An extra week of being a useless fat blob. An extra week of soreness and tiredness and-"

"Okay, okay, geez!" Rebecca acquiesced.

* * *

><p>"Quit the Animus early today, hmm?" Colin asked as he spotted Desmond in the hall.<p>

"Yeah. Mission accomplished," Desmond said, eyes downcast.

"You don't sound too happy about it."

"It's weird."

"Your asexual technologically-induced hermaphroditic male pregnancy has become **weird**, huh?"

Spencer was there now too. "Yeah, I'd have thought you were used to weird shit by now, man. If anything, knowing whose it is should make things **less** weird."

Desmond waited a few seconds and then mumbled, "Kaczmarek."

There was a brief silence while Spencer processed the three syllables. "As in... **Clay** Kaczmarek?"

"Unless you know any other Kaczmareks whose genes coulda gotten into me."

"Clay... is the father."

"You mean the other father," Colin corrected.

"Yeah." Desmond managed to make eye contact at last.

"Didn't he... um." Spencer apparently couldn't bring himself to finish the question.

"Die? Yeah. I guess if you want to get technical, then it wasn't him, it was his crazy Animus backup copy A.I. thingy."

"Not only that..." Rebecca's voice came from behind him.

"What? There's more?" Spencer turned a little pale. "Don't tell me it's twins or something!"

"Clay might be the baby as well."

Spencer facepalmed. "Okay, now you're **definitely** screwing with us."

"You think we could make this shit up?" Desmond countered.

"But... Didn't that test say half its genes are you? That means it can't be Clay, right?"

Repressing his dislike of the term "it" for now, he answered, "Could be just his mind."

"Ah," Colin said, understanding. "You think he transferred his mind into the fetus the same way he transferred it into the Animus? But, if that's the case... were the fetus and uterus already inside you? Or were they his creations as well?"

"Fuck if I know! Once he learns to talk, you can ask him yourself!" Desmond rubbed his head. "God, I need a drink." Rebecca opened her mouth to protest but he cut her off. "Don't say it, I know I can't!"

* * *

><p>That night as Desmond lay in bed, he looked down at his bulbous belly.<p>

"Hey... Clay?" he said, sotto voce. _This is an idiotic idea, but..._ "If... if that's you in there, Clay, then... can you let me know somehow? Like.. I dunno, kick sixteen times?" Instantly wishing he'd specified a different, less painful signal, he shut his eyes tight and braced himself.

Nothing happened, though. Desmond relaxed, but only physically, not mentally. _If he'd done it, it would have proved it was him. But the absence of kicking doesn't prove anything either way. Whoever he is, he probably can't even hear me, much less understand me._

He was still grappling with the concept of raising a kid in the first place. Now he had to deal with the disturbing possibility of that kid's mind being the tangled psyche of Clay Kaczmarek.


	23. Hand-me-down

June 10, 2013

"Aggg!" Spencer had just come around the side of the building, and recoiled at the sight of a massive hairy mound. "Desmond!"

"What?" The man to whom the mound was attached queried in response. Determined to participate in training exercises as much as he could despite gravidity, he was currently sitting in a lounge chair, tossing throwing knives at a range of targets some fifty to seventy feet away.

"Can't you cover yourself up, man?!"

"Cut me a break, it's hot as balls and none of my shirts fit." A blade whizzed through the air, piercing the Templar seal in the center of the furthest target with a satisfying **chnk**.

"Borrow one of my shirts, I'm sure that'll fit!" Spencer offered, covering his eyes. "Hell, **keep** one of my shirts, **several** of them if you need, I don't care, but nobody wants to see that thing hanging out!"

Rebecca paused practicing her punches to address this comment. "Hey, that's the beautiful miracle of life you're talking about!"

Now it was Desmond who made a gagging noise. "Ugh, Becca..."

"Come on, Dezzy-wezzy," she cajoled, drawing out the words with a sickening saccharinity. "Aren't children the reason Assassins exist? Isn't that what we're all about? Fighting to improve the world, even just a little bit, even if we die in the process, all for the sake of generations to come?"

"Fuck **off**. We fight Templars because they're domineering assholes, it has nothing to do with babies." A final knife was flung. "And don't start in with the stupid nicknames, I get enough of that from Colin." Desmond pulled himself out of the chair. "Hey, let's go for a swim."

"In the reservoir?"

He shrugged. "Looks like a lake to me, but whatever. Race you to the shore!" He headed off in some weird semi-waddling approximation of a run.

"Hey, be careful!" Spencer yelled, following after him. "Some plane could fly overhead and spot you!"

"Or they might hear you screaming at the top of your lungs!" Desmond laughed. "Come on! Live a little! So what if some random pilot sees me? Not everyone's a Templar!"

"Yeah, but an eight-months-pregnant **man** might still attract suspicion!"

"Chill out, already." He kicked off his sandals and splashed eagerly into the water. "They'll just think I got a beer belly, not a baby bump."

"Ag..." Spencer mumbled, then raised his voice further. "Fine! But don't overexert yourself! Don't swim too hard or go too far out! And come straight back here if you feel any cramping! The last thing we need is your fucking water breaking while you're out there!"

"The only cramping going on right now is you cramping my style!" Desmond called, and dove underwater to escape any further nagging.

* * *

><p>William came by his room after dinner, carrying a cardboard box.<p>

"Hey dad." Desmond greeted him without anger for once. "Whatcha got there?"

"Clothes. I heard yours don't fit anymore, is that correct?"

"Um, yeah." All of his shirts and many of his pants were too small to accommodate the advanced state of his pregnancy.

William set the box on Desmond's bed. "These... these belonged to your mother."

_Oh great. Maternity clothes_, he thought, but didn't say it out loud. What he did say was, "That book, these clothes... You held on to a lot of her stuff, huh."

"We hold on to most things."

"Right. Can't exactly have a garage sale." He rifled through some of the items. Apparently Janet Miles had not been a fan of skirts and dresses. Either that, or William had had the presence of mind to remove those from the box before presenting it to his son.

Desmond began to sort the clothes into those he would consider wearing, and those he wouldn't, but about halfway through, he was overcome by a powerful surge of heartache, and he had to sit down, feeling tears coming to his eyes.

"Are you all right?" William asked, concerned.

"I... This... This really sucks... that she's not here." His voice was choked with emotion. "But... I wasn't there for her... for any of you... when things got bad," here he referred to both the Purge and his mother's battle with cancer, "so I guess it's only fair."

William moved the box out of the way and sat down, uneasily, next to his son. "What happened would still have happened if you hadn't left."

"Yeah, but... it might have been easier for you guys. I might have been able to help somehow." He wiped wetness from his cheeks.

"There's no sense in beating yourself up about the past."

"I… I guess you're right," he lamented. "I was just a stupid kid... Now I'm gonna **have** a stupid kid. Or a crazy smart kid, which might actually be worse."

William's mouth tightened. "Do you really think it could be Kaczmarek? Actually him, not just his genes?"

Desmond blinked away his tears and gave his father a serious look. "You should've heard him. The way he asked to come with me. He knew how to put himself into the Animus... He knew it was possible to put himself into my brain... Maybe this is his twisted idea of a compromise, since I said no."

"I knew Clay Kaczmarek. I wouldn't think he'd force something like this on you... on anyone."

Desmond returned his attention to the box. "Well, maybe after all he went through, after losing his mind- most of it, if not all of it- maybe he lost some of his scruples too."

"That may be," William allowed, then paused for a few awkward moments and cleared his throat. "I was wondering... Would you like me to be there?"

"What?" Desmond turned back to face him. "Be where?"

"Be... with you. When he's born."

Desmond didn't know how to reply. He'd so far only thought about the birth in terms of how he himself would cope. He hadn't even considered what anyone else would be doing during the event.

"I... I wasn't able to be there for Janet." William sounded ashamed of this fact.

More to put off having to answer the original question than out of a real desire to know, Desmond asked, "Why not?"

"I was out of state. Assassin business."

Desmond rolled his eyes. _Typical him. Assassin stuff's more important than family._

"Although, frankly, I don't remember anymore what that business was," he admitted. "So... Do you... want me to be there, then?"

He considered it. _I can't imagine how having him hanging around will help me... but it kinda sounds like he **wants** to be there... like that'll make it up to Mom somehow._ "Well, maybe... maybe just the labor, but not the... y'know... not the actual birth part." _It's bad enough having Stacey looking at my freaky mutant crotch, I don't need anyone else to see that part of me!_ "Yeah. Definitely not that part. No offense Dad, but I-"

"Of course. I understand."

Desmond slipped on one of his mother's shirts, a dark blue number with vertical pleats that managed to cover the fullness of his midriff. "Uh. Be honest. Does this make me look… stupid?" He waved a hand immediately after this sentence, erasing the words he'd just spoken. "Never mind, don't answer that. I know I look stupid, how could I not look stupid? Lemme change the subject. About this Clay thing… I..." He swallowed. "I been thinking some more about it. The kid might have his mind. But he might not. I mean… he asked to come with me, and I could tell he really wanted to… 'I just don't want to be here anymore,'" Desmond quoted, remembering the exact depressive intonation of every word. "But he **did** ask. And I **did** say no. And he seemed okay with it. Well, not exactly 'okay'. But he… I mean, why would he want to be a baby anyway? Wouldn't he prefer to be in my adult body?"

William just listened to the rambling speech.

"Anyway, what I'm trying to say is…" Desmond rubbed his belly unconsciously, but didn't stop once he realized he was doing it. "Unless we find evidence to the contrary, I'm gonna act as if this is a normal kid, with a normal kid brain, not the fucked-up brain of a dead digital dude. Juno talked to Clay, I told you that, remember? She must've had access to his DNA somehow, and, for whatever crazy reason, she got me pregnant with that."

William nodded. "That does seem the more likely scenario."

Desmond chuckled sardonically. "I dunno about more likely, but it's easier on me. It'll be nutty enough taking care of a normal kid. I don't want to be thinking I'm taking care of a thirty-years-old mind in a baby body."

* * *

><p>June 17, 2013<p>

"You ready to face the big day?" Rebecca asked Desmond at the lunch table.

"The what?" he asked after swallowing.

"I believe she means the day you give birth," Stacey said.

He winced. "What do you think? Of course not! Don't know if I'll ever truly be 'ready' for that!"

Rebecca replied with "You up for another Animus session?"

"Uh?" Desmond was confused by this conversational gear shift.

"You practiced assassinating and freerunning with your ancestors before you ever did it in real life."

"Wait, are you saying I should..." He had a hunch on what she was proposing, but he wasn't quite able to verbalize the concept.

"A-yep."

He shook his head. "A-nope! No way! Been there, done that! I don't think it gave me any particular insights into the process!"

"Huh? When did this happen?"

"Right before Lucy got me out of Abstergo. She had me relive Ezio being born. Not sure why!"

"Oh, I bet that was fun," Spencer said with obvious sarcasm.

"No, I'm talking about you being the birth**er**, not the birth**ee**," Rebecca explained.

"Ugh, I'm already having to do it once, why would I volunteer to do it another time?"

"I'm not sure that's a good idea. Well, okay, it is a good **idea**," Stacey amended, "but you shouldn't do it. Even if Desmond wanted to-"

"And I don't!"

"-just reliving a childbirth could somehow trigger labor in his actual body. Premature labor means a premature baby. He's definitely viable by this point, but I'd still like to avoid that."

"Right," Rebecca acquiesced. "His legs twitch when an ancestor runs, so his uterus might contract when one goes into labor."

Spencer cracked a smile. "'His uterus'. Man. That's a phrase I never thought I'd hear, outside of, like, transgender stuff."

Stacey then turned to Desmond. "Actually, this late in the pregnancy, you need to limit the time you spend in a reclining posture, which means that**any** Animus usage is straight out, okay?"

He looked at her incredulously. "What, now I'm not allowed to lie down?"

"You can lie on your side, just not on your back, okay? That'd put the weight of the uterus right on your aorta and vena cava. Those are major blood vessels," she added to clarify.

"Oh. No problem," he shrugged, returning his attention to his cheese sandwich. "Hurts like hell to lie on my back anyway. Like a bowling ball right on my spine."

"Yo, speaking of premature babies," Spencer said, "I ain't kidding about you need to not overexert yourself."

"Overexert this, Vermaak." Desmond flipped the bird.

"Seriously, dude. You already went into early labor once, I don't want it to happen again."

"I did?" He was puzzled for a few seconds before remembering that the cover story for his Bleeding Effect last month was premature labor. "Oh, yeah, right. I did."

Spencer shook his head. "I honestly don't see how you can forget something like that."

"Uhh, pregnancy kinda fucks with my brain a little bit," Desmond fudged. "Y'know, stress and hormones and tiredness and stuff."

"Well anyway, you gotta be careful. I know he's viable or whatever now, but still... Once that kid comes out, everything changes. Life around here's gonna get way hectic. So I think it's best you take it easy, so he'll stay in as long as possible, capeesh?"

Desmond rolled his eyes. "Va bene. Capisco." The other three looked at him questioningly. "What?"

"Are you aware you just answered him in Italian?"

"God, don't get all worried about it, I'm fine! He said 'capisce', I was just going along with it!" He took an angry bite of his pickle. "I haven't even been in Italy in forever! If I suddenly break into Polish again, **then** you can start freaking out."

"Again?" Spencer asked. "As in, it happened before?"

_Me and my big mouth._ Desmond tried to downplay it. "What, you want me to send out a memo every single time I have a Bleeding Effect?"

However, this had the opposite effect from what he intended. "You saying there's been a lot of them?"

"No, I'm saying it was no big deal! It'd get really annoying for you guys if I told everyone all my stupid minor complaints. Like, today I'm really wanting some of that vodka Alojzy drank, and also I wanna go kill some Templars but I can't do either one! There's nothing anyone can do about it so there's no point telling you." He stood up. "Now if you'll stop fussing over me for once, I gotta go piss for like the tenth time today, and then I'm planning to sleep for as many hours as Clay's stupid kid will permit me to. That sound like taking it easy enough for ya?!" Desmond stomped out of the kitchen.

Stacey watched him leave, then turned to the other two. "Has he always been this moody or is it just the hormones?"

"He's always been kinda moody," Rebecca said. "But who could blame him? He's had a shit life. Does seem a little bit worse nowadays, though."

"Hope he chills out a bit once it's born," said Spencer. "I don't wanna have to put up with him and the baby **both** screaming and fussing."


	24. Paternalia

June 20, 2013

Knowing by now that simply knocking wasn't enough to rouse him, William skipped straight to opening his son's door, spilling a beam of light into the dark bedroom. "Desmond?"

"Ugh... what?" came the grumpy reply from the boxer-clad man sprawled over the sheets.

"Team meeting."

"About what?"

There was a tiny pause. "Finances."

Desmond rubbed his eyes. "Do I have to be there?"

"Would you rather be left out of the discussion on account of your condition?"

This remark had the effect William knew it would. "No, I'll come, just gimme a minute!" Moving uncannily fast given his current size, Desmond sprang out of bed and got dressed.

* * *

><p>"Do I have to be here?"<p>

"Aw, Shaun, don't be such a wet blanket. It'll be fun."

"Last time I checked, being an Assassin wasn't about having fun! I don't know about you lot, but as for me I actually have important things to do around here!"

"More important than Desmond and his son?"

"Probably, yeah!" This answer earned Shaun dirty looks from a few of the others, though he couldn't see them in the dark.

"Shh!" Spencer hissed. "I hear them coming."

"Get ready, guys!"

The war room fell silent.

Two sets of footsteps approached.

As Desmond opened the door, his father behind him, the lights snapped on.

"SURPRISE!"

Desmond shut his eyes against the sudden influx of photons, then opened them a crack. _Is that really… yes. Yes, it is a cutesy blue banner that says "Congrats, Dadmond"._ Covering his face, he groused, "Does that banner mean what I think it means?"

"Yeah," answered Spencer aloofly. "This is a baby shower. Rebecca's idea."

Desmond shivered despite the summer heat. "Thanks but no thanks!" He rapidly exited, clunking the door back into its original closed position, then retreated to his room and flopped on the bed again.

William followed him cautiously. "Desmond," he began in a tone which he hoped came off as gentle.

"Finances meeting, my ass. You knew that wasn't a finances meeting. You knew they were planning this."

"Rebecca told me this morning. That was the first I'd heard of it."

"Why would they think I'd want a baby shower, Dad? Hell, I don't even want a baby!"

"Well..." William fumbled around in his vocabulary for the right words, though he wasn't quite sure that "right words" for this situation even existed. He thought of a possible reply and soon dismissed it.

...But then again, he couldn't think of anything better, so he went ahead with it anyway. "You didn't want to be an Assassin either."

"That's different!" shouted Desmond. "Completely different! That's... We're... I... " His body trembled as his mind argued with itself, begging to contradict what he'd just said. Was it really all that different? He had tried to deny his Assassin heritage, had ignored it as long as he could. And he'd done the same with the pregnancy. _No_, he told himself firmly. _No. It's not the same. Lucy did ask me, back then, whether I'd help them._ The other part of his mind raised the implications of her true allegiance, asked what she would have done if he'd refused. He ignored this. _It doesn't matter. She asked, and I said yes. Nobody asked me to get pregnant._ "Being an Assassin... I **chose** that. Eventually."

"You have a choice about this too, Desmond."

"Stacey?" He turned over and saw she had joined his father in the doorway. "What do you mean?"

"You didn't choose to carry this baby," she said, her words fragile, "but you **can** make a choice about it." He was about to issue an angry rebuttal, but she wasn't done. "You can choose to love him and be the best father you can for him. Or you can choose to give him up."

"Give him up?"

"It would be possible, wouldn't it?" The medic looked to the Mentor. "To send him to some other den? The Montreal den, perhaps? Shaun could bring him when he goes in August. Concoct some story, say we rescued a pregnant woman from Templars, say she was ill and she died in childbirth."

William's brow furrowed the way it always did when he was weighing things in his mind.

"No, I don't want that," Desmond said quickly, then blinked in apparent surprise at his own words.

"You don't?" William asked.

"I... I don't... He... I..." Desmond stammered, thoroughly tongue-tied by his thoughts. It was a tempting proposition at first blush, but he felt revulsion at the idea of someone else raising his kid. But then again, maybe the Montreal Assassins would do a better job at parenting. He knew they had more people there, and probably a better-equipped hideout... "I... Ow!" He cringed, and darted a hand to the side of his ribs.

Stacey was instantly crouching in front of him. "Desmond? Was that a contraction?"

The reply was a pained and gasping chuckle. "No... It's just... He just kicked the shit out of my lung or something... Serves me right, for thinking of sending him away to live with a buncha strangers." He stroked his stomach through the seersucker shirt. "Calm down, kiddo. You're not going anywhere. I'll..." He swallowed. "I'll take care of you. I'll be your dad... I mean, I already **am** your dad, I might as well start acting like it."

Stacey patted his back. "It's okay if you don't want the baby shower. They'll understand."

"Though it does seem like they worked awfully hard to put it together," William added. "You should see some of the presents they've made."

Desmond got up, cradling the curve of his belly, emotions still swirling within him. "Okay... I'll... I'll give it another chance."

* * *

><p>"Hey, guys. I'm back," Desmond waved as he reentered the war room. "Sorry I was a jerk before."<p>

"Oh? You decided you're cool with a baby shower after all?" Spencer asked. He and Colin were standing on chairs, midway through taking down the banner.

"Well... Maybe." Desmond rubbed his back. "But can we call it something else? 'Baby shower' sounds so wimpy and stupid."

"How about 'prenatal party'?" Colin suggested. "Or 'fatherhood festival'?"

Shaun looked down his nose at Desmond's outfit. "Are you wearing culottes?"

"So what if I am? It's fucking tough finding manly maternity clothes. And these culottes belonged to my mom, so don't be an asshole about it." He settled into a chair. "Now... I heard something about some presents?"

"Here's one to start you off with," Colin said, handing over a flat square box. Inside was a photo album, with the Assassin crest engraved shallowly in the wooden cover. "Woah, Colin," Desmond breathed, impressed by the craftmanship, "Did you make this yourself?"

Colin nodded matter-of-factly.

Desmond flipped through the album pages. "Oh, you already put some-"

"Yeah, here's hoping these photos don't 'suck balls'."

There was one of him in the Animus, with Rebecca waving from behind her computer. There was one of him on the couch, staring into the distance, hand on belly. There was one of him out hunting turkeys with Spencer. There was one of him wading into Chittenden Reservoir. "They're… not bad." Desmond turned to the next page. "Oh. You, uh..." There was one of not him, but another man, out jogging on a trail somewhere, wearing a familiar brown jacket and laughing at something. "You put a pic of Clay in, I see."

"It's his kid too." Colin moved one shoulder in a half-shrugging motion to express 'of course I did.'

This Clay looked strange to Desmond, and he soon realized why. It was because this Clay was actually happy. "This is back before all that shit happened to him, huh."

"Yeah, that's from oh-nine, I think. Or oh-ten. Several years back, at any rate. I can engrave your son's name on the cover too, if you want," Colin offered, not bothering to segue between the two topics.

Rebecca snapped her fingers. "Right! I was gonna ask whether you picked out a name yet!"

Desmond's face twitched imperceptibly. "Not yet." _Geez, why am I having so much trouble with this part? If I can't even name him how the hell am I gonna raise him?_

"Well, you better get cracking, Jack. You look about ready to pop." Rebecca poked him through the gaps between shirt buttons. Shaun made a slight noise of disgust.

"Don't do that." Desmond shoved Rebecca's hand away and looked back through the photos. "Wait, this Animus one..." He peered closely at the image on the monitor. "That's from when I was reliving Anton! You've been taking pics of me a lot longer than I thought. And how'd you get this one of me and Spencer?"

"Stealth, yo." was Colin's concise reply.

"Okay, the album's nice, but let's not spend all our time looking at it." said Stacey, proffering a brown paper bag. "Rebecca and I worked together on this."

Desmond took it from her and removed the object inside. "Who or what is this suppo- Oh! Derrr." It was a plush doll dressed in white and red, a flutter of cloth fastened to one shoulder, with a short beard fashioned out of felt. But the two most striking features were the beaked hood and the emblem on the belt. Lifting one arm of the toy to make it strike a heroic pose, Desmond put on a very convincing vocal impression. "Vittoria agli Assassini!" He then returned to his normal voice. "Haha. Nice."

Rebecca grinned. "Well, it's meant to be for Junior, but I'm glad you like it too."

"I should've recognized him immediately. Guess it's been too long since I last hung out with Ezio." Desmond ran a hand through his hair. "God, can you believe that wasn't even a year ago? A year ago I was still in New York and everything was pretty much normal. Since then my life has been a fucking roller-coaster."

"Not just your life, bud."

He nodded. "Yeah. And it's just gonna get more wild and crazy from here, I suppose. What's the next present?"

"Here ya go." Spencer handed over a scrap of paper. "Sorry it's kinda rushed. Don't take this the wrong way, but I didn't want to put too much effort in the gift, since I didn't think you'd be into this bab- I mean, this prenatal party."

Desmond unfolded it quizzically and read the scrawl aloud. "Coupon good for ten workout sessions with me, to help you get back into shape after Junior's out." He looked up. "Uh, I don't really need any help exercising, I can do it myself."

"Okay, then, lemme see it, I'll make a slight edit." Desmond passed the paper back to Spencer, who scratched through the text and read out what he was replacing it with. "How about... Coupon good for ten... babysitting sessions... one hour each."

"Now that's something I can use!"

"Hey Shaun, stop sulking and give him yours," Rebecca said, giving the bespectacled Brit a soft shove in the arm.

"Fine, whatever I have to do to get this nonsense over with so I can get back to my work." Shaun's gift was a book again: The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. "Figured the little blighter might want some bedtime stories."

Desmond hefted the heavy tome, then perused its contents. "Damn, this guy wrote a shit ton of stuff."

"Did you know his real name was Charles Dodgson?"

"No, Colin, I didn't. You a fan of his?"

"Nah, fiction's not really my bag. I use my brain cells for things that are real."

"Ah, but remember," Desmond waggled Ezio playfully. "Nulla è reale!"

"'True' is not the same as 'real'."

William interrupted their back-and-forth. "Let's not nitpick the Creed. Here, Desmond."

He plucked the cassette tape from his father's outstretched hand. "Lullaby music?"

"Yes, I know it's not much, but I didn't have much notice-"

"No, it's great. All this stuff is great. Thanks, guys. I'm... This is really nice of you. " Desmond smiled and sniffled slightly.

"Don't start bawling or I'm out of here," Shaun warned him.

"Oy, you can't leave yet!" Colin produced his camera from somewhere. "I've yet to get a nice group shot. Plus I made cupcakes!"


	25. Adorbs

June 24, 2013

Desmond was at the table writing something when Rebecca came to make her lunch. "What'cha got there, bud?"

"Mmkinalish," he said through a mouth full of peanut butter.

"Making a list of what?" She peered over his shoulder and read aloud. "Think of a name, learn how to change diapers... these are your Junior to-dos?"

"Mm." Desmond swallowed. "Yeah." He drew two bold lines under "Think of a name" and added an exclamation mark.

Rebecca smiled. "Does emphasizing it like that help you get it done?"

"It can't hurt."

The smile became a full-on grin. "Ooh, you could call him Mark, from exclamation mark."

"Mark Miles?" Desmond rubbed a finger on his cheek thoughtfully. "I dunno, Becca, that kinda sounds like a comic book character."

"Excuse me?"

"Mark Miles. Doesn't that name make you think of Bruce Banner or Lex Luthor or Peter Parker?"

"Well, maybe he'll have superpowers like they do." Rebecca saw Desmond roll his eyes at this. "Hey, it's possible! Eagle Vision's pretty much a superpower, isn't it? Maybe Mark will inherit it, and grow up to be the mild-mannered alter ego of... Assassin Man, or something."

"What would 'Assassin Man' do that distinguishes him from regular Assassins? We already fight for justice against legions of evil," Desmond pointed out.

She shrugged. "I dunno, I'm just spitballing here."

"Mm. You really think he'll inherit Eagle Vision from me?"

"It's possible."

"Whatever, I'm not naming him 'Mark Miles'."

Rebecca seemed to notice something for the first time. "You're eating peanut butter straight from the jar."

"Why, yes. Yes I am." He waggled the spoon at her. "You got a problem with that?"

"Thought you said you weren't having cravings."

"Well, I had one now, okay? Don't get on my case about it."

"My god, you're so adorbs!" She suddenly leaned over and hugged him. "Widdle preggo Dessy and his cravy-wavies!"

Desmond squirmed in her surprisingly strong grip. "Gah, lemme go! And don't call me 'Desi', that's a girl's name!"

Rebecca finally released him. "Is not. Don't you know the actor Desi Arnaz?"

"Should I?"

"He played _I Love Lucy_'s husband."

Desmond rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Aw crap, you had to remind me about Lucy. Great."

"You still feel bad about that?" Rebecca sat down in the chair next to his.

"I haven't for a long time, but these fucking hormones are playing havoc with my emotions and shit." He stood up abruptly and put away the peanut butter. "Let's talk about something else. Um. Having a kid..."

"Yeah? Having a kid what?"

He sat back down, anxiety drawing his face tight. "I mean, on TV and stuff they always say it's the worst pain ever, but that's just an exaggeration, right? Do you think it's really that bad?"

"Well I've never done it, but I've had friends with kids, and from what they've said, it sounds pretty excruciating."

"That's not exactly the answer I was hoping for."

"Sorry, bud." She patted his shoulder. "But it'll be worth it to meet Junior, right? You said you were looking forward to meeting him."

Desmond's mouth wrinkled with uncertainly. "It sure as hell better be worth it."

"Mm. Hey, have you been following the Snowden situation?"

"The what?"

"Guess you haven't. That Verax guy, who spilled the beans about the Templars spying on the whole internet. He revealed his identity. His name's Edward Snowden."

"Oh. That's kinda stupid of him, isn't it?"

Rebecca shrugged. "A little bit, but he's all like 'oh I need to be transparent about this' and whatever. He obviously doesn't know Templars like we do, or else he might have decided to be more secretive. Anyway, he hightailed it out of Hong Kong and now he's in Russia or something, it's a huge deal in the mainstream media."

Desmond gaped. "The mainstream media? They know about this?"

"Yeah, that Laura or whoever her name was in the Hong Kong Assassins tried to convince the Guardian not to run the story but they ran it after all. It's like the biggest scandal ever, though of course the Muggles don't know it's actually Templars."

"Geez, why did nobody tell me this?"

"There's updates on Hephaestus, which I guess you haven't been checking lately."

"Well number one, I wasn't sure that shit was still secure, and number two, I've been kind of preoccupied with this pregnancy thing!"

* * *

><p><em>A variety of non-medical methods can be used to help you cope with labor pains, including breathing techniques, meditation, aromatherapy, hypnosis, massage...<em>

"Buncha hippy bullshit," muttered Desmond as he tossed the book to the floor. The mention of hypnosis did spark an idea in him, though. _Could the Apple... nah. That's stupid. That thing's so fickle and unpredictable. Fucking hard to control. I've mostly only used it to kill people. Using it to create the illusion of a painless birth would probably not be quite as straightforward. Who knows what might happen?_ His breath hitched in his throat. _Shit, I might accidentally kill **him**!_ He wrapped his arms protectively around his unborn son and whispered, "Sorry."

Desmond then got up, the bedsprings squeaking slightly as they were relieved of his weight. He picked up _Pregnancy 101_ and placed it on the shelf next to _Alphabetical Initiation_, _The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll_, _A History of the World in 12 Maps_, and the photo album from Colin. The foot-tall Ezio served as a bookend to the eclectic collection.

He'd used to keep his Hidden Blade on the bookshelf as well, but he hadn't worn it in months, and every time he saw the damn thing, it upset him slightly. The sight only served to remind him he wouldn't be using it for who knows how much longer while he was stuck in the Compound gestating and childrearing. It wasn't safe to leave weapons within child's reach anyway, so the blade was currently secreted away in the back of a dresser drawer, keeping company with his normal (i.e. non-maternity) clothes.

The pregnant man then turned around slowly, taking in what his room had become. Another piece of furniture had been crafted recently, and now stood next to the crib. "I don't need another bookshelf," Desmond had said when Colin had dragged it into his room.

"Ah, this is no bookshelf, Desman, but a changing table."

"Changing..." Desmond's stomach had turned at the thought. _Oh god. Diapers. Motherfucking diapers._

"Yep," Colin had replied, oblivious to the sickening mental images in his friend's head. "See, kiddo goes up here- we'll put a little mini mattress pad there so he's not right on the bare wood of course- and you store ye olde diapers and whatnot on these shelves down here."

For now, there weren't any diapers, just stacks of itsy-bitsy clothes. Desmond picked up one of the garments, trying to imagine a baby inside 's he going to look like anyway? He recalled the smiling Polaroid of his own newborn self. _I guess he'll look kinda like that. But with some Clay mixed in._ He shook his head and put the onesie back in the stack. _Come on, there's no point wondering what he looks like. I'll fucking find out soon enough._

* * *

><p>"Stacey?" Desmond called out as he opened the infirmary door. "I needa ask- Oh," he said, realizing there was someone else there besides the medic.<p>

"Christ, Desmond, have you heard of knocking?" Shaun griped. Stacey was bandaging his arm.

"What happened to you?"

"Sprained wrist."

"Aw, how'd you sprain it?"

He let out a dry chuckle. "Spencer metaphorically twisted my arm to convice me to spar with him. Then he **literally** twisted my arm, albeit by accident. I should have known better than to agree to a martial arts match with someone twice my weight, even just for practice."

"Heh. Yeah, I thought you were smarter than that."

Shaun's gaze drifted unwillingly downward from Desmond's face, arriving at the spot where his fingers were drumming idly. "I can't believe you're actually okay with... that."

"What, this? Being **pregnant**?" Desmond emphasized the word just to mess with him, and was rewarded with a wince from the other man, as if he was physically hurt by the sound of it. "Yeah, I guess I'm kind of okay with being **pregnant**." Another wince. "At first I didn't believe I was **pregnant**, being **pregnant** used to freak me out, I used to try to keep being **pregnant** a secret from you guys, but now I've been **preg**-"

"Christ," Shaun interrupted him, his voice almost a squeal, "stop saying it over and over like that!" He got up and left in an agitated huff. "Bloody hell, if I never hear that word again, it'll be too soon!"

"What word?" Desmond called after him. "**Pregnant**?"

"Hey, cut it out already, he told you to stop," Stacey said, though he could tell she was amused. "You wanted to ask me something?"

"Oh, yeah, I did. Um." His mood shifted back to anxiety, and he sat down. "When I'm uh, having the kid... You can give me one of those epidural thingies if I want, right? So it doesn't hurt?"

She shook her head sadly. "Sorry. I don't think I'd be able to. Spinal injections are tricky business, I don't want to risk doing a procedure like that without proper training."

Desmond's face quirked in confusion. "What? But you're a doctor!"

"I'm not actually a full doctor, haven't you picked up on that by now? I did tell you I haven't been to med school."

He facepalmed. "Right. Too expensive. The Air Force medical training whatever. And you didn't even finish that, did you? Great, my life and the life of my kid are in the hands of a fucking amateur."

If she was insulted by this, she hid it well. "Look, you'll be fine. They did teach me a little about delivering babies-"

"Just a little?!" Desmond's heart palpitated.

"It wasn't exactly the main thrust of my training, okay? But I've been reading up on it since we found out about your situation, okay? You'll be fine," Stacey repeated, trying to stay calm. "You're low-risk, remember? I don't forsee any problems with your delivery."

"Says the lady who isn't even a doctor. I did wonder why dad always called you 'Ms. Russ' and not 'Dr. Russ.'" Desmond frowned. "Is there a Mr. Russ?"

"Let's not go off on a tangent. You're worried about labor pain, right?"

The frown deepened. "Maybe just a little." He didn't want to admit the true extent of his worry. I might be pregnant, but I'm still a man. And men are supposed to be tough. Especially Assassins.

"Well, I'm not willing to try epiduralizing you, and risk paralyzing you by accident," she said, patting his knee softly, "but I can give you pain meds if you need them, okay?"

Desmond didn't reply.

"Look, I know it'll be painful," she acknowledged. "And I know it'll be scary. But you're a brave man. Remember what you told me? You've had plenty of scary and painful experiences in the Animus."

He couldn't help smiling at that. "Heh. Yeah. Being stabbed, shot, nearly hanged, and drowning a majillion times because Altaïr never learned to swim."

"Right." Stacey returned the smile warmly. "Having a baby can't be too bad compared to all of that."

* * *

><p>Author's Note: Thank you to Apparition of a Fox, Hack-Generation, and vanecool for your kind reviews! It makes me so happy to know my work is enjoyed by others :) I have the rest of the story mostly complete by now, so expect frequent updates. I also have a sequel in the works. Uh-oh, my other unfinished fanfictions are looking at me angrily... "Why have you abandoned us?!" "I haven't abandoned you! You guys are still important to me, but I'm working on <em>Kryptokos<em> right now, okay? -_-; "


	26. Diapers and Dads

July 3, 2013

There was a soft 'thwap' as Desmond's half-eaten BLT fell from his hands back onto the plate. But nobody heard that. What they **did** hear was him saying, "Ow! Son of a bitch!"

"Lil' parasite sure can kick, can't he." Rebecca observed.

"Ahh-fff." He gritted his teeth. "This is no kick."

Shaun dropped his own sandwich and turned pale. "Erm, are you saying... what I think you're saying?"

"Oh hell no!" Spencer jabbed an angry finger at Desmond's stomach. "This is **my** birthday, you little bratoid! Not yours!"

Rebecca joined in berating the fetus. "Yeah, you're not supposed to come for another couple weeks!"

"Well, urgh... I am getting pretty tired of having this guy inside me. Ow. But it'd be nice if he could just, like, teleport out, and skip the whole **birth** thing." Desmond shuddered.

"Can we not talk about **birth** at the goddamn lunch table!?" Shaun begged. "Please?!"

"We'll go somewhere else, then," Stacey said, getting up and taking Desmond down the hall to the infirmary.

His face bore a nervous and disgusted expression. "Birth... I'm going to give birth... This," he placed both hands on the convexity, "is going to come out of... there!"

"I know, it's not going to be a walk in the park. But I'll get you through it," the medic promised him. "Okay, that contraction's over now, right?"

"Yeah," Desmond took a seat. "It's **been** over, actually. It was really quick. Pretty intense though."

"I've got painkillers on hand for you if it starts to get **too** intense. Tell me the moment you feel the next one." She pressed something on her watch.

"So this is actually finally happening." Desmond idly ran his finger back and forth over a seam in the fabric covering the cot. "My 'widdle Apple-baby' is finally coming." Back and forth. "Um... Stacey?"

"Yes?"

"Do you think I'll be a good dad?"

"I think you'll be a great dad."

"Heh. Thanks for the vote of confidence." Back and forth. "I don't feel very confident at all." He stared at the floor.

"Well, you're dealing with this remarkably well, considering..." she trailed off.

Desmond looked up at her. "Considering I'm a man having another man's baby? Considering I used'ta wanna abort him but I couldn't? Considering I was only knocked up in the first place because of crazy Assassin shit that I never wanted to be a part of, but now I'm more-or-less okay with both the Assassin part and the pregnant man part?"

Stacey smiled slightly. "Well, yes. That pretty much sums up what I was thinking... Are you feeling anything yet?"

"Nope." Back and forth. "Feeling hungry, 'cause I didn't get to finish my lunch."

"Have you thought of a name yet?"

"I dunno." Back and forth. "Clay 2.0?"

"Wouldn't Clay 2.0 be the one you met in the Animus?"

"Heh, guess you're right. Clay 3.0 then." Back and forth.

The two of them waited, awkwardly silent. Several minutes passed, then several more. The ticking of the clock seemed unbearably loud.

After yet more minutes, there was a knock at the doors. "Hey there." It was Rebecca. "I brought you the rest of your sandwich, in case you still want it."

"Hell yeah I still want it. Thanks, Becca." He took a hearty bite.

She hummed in thought. "Hey, the rest of you are lost causes, but maybe I can get the kid to be vegetarian."

"He's **my** kid, I'll let him eat what he wants! Have your own kid if you want to go all Food Templar on someone!" This earned him a not-very-light smack on the arm from Rebecca. "Ow!"

"Serves you right, calling me a Food Templar."

"C'mon, can't you take a joke?" He rubbed his arm. "Can't believe you hit me. I'm pregnant, you know!"

"Not for much longer, you know!" Rebecca echoed. "Speaking of which, how's the labor going?"

Stacey sighed. "I'm not sure it's 'going' at all yet."

Desmond blinked. "What do you mean? Of course it's 'going', what was that insane cramp I felt if it wasn't a contraction?!"

"You said it was over really quickly, right? When did it stop?"

"Uh... Like, right after I left the table."

"And it hasn't started again since. Sounds like a Braxton Hicks contraction."

"A **what** contraction?"

"Braxton Hicks," she repeated. "Basically, it's practice."

He blinked again. "Practice?!"

"Yeah. It's the uterus' way of warming up for the real contractions. If you were actually in labor, you should've had another one by now." Stacey gave him a curious look. "This should have been in that book William gave you. Didn't you read it?"

"Well, I've been **trying** to. I've read some parts, but a lot of it is all sappy and girly and stuff. All this crap about 'your little one' and 'your bundle of joy' and 'your hubby' and 'the miracle of life', gah!" He threw up his hands in exasperation. "I couldn't take it!"

"Yeah, I can see how that would turn you off." She rolled her chair across the room and grabbed a book off her desk. "Okay, you can try this one. It's just the facts, none of the fluff."

"_Clinician's Handbook of Obstetrics and Jeenaycology_," he read.

"That's 'gynecology', ya doof," Rebecca said, lightly swatting the back of his head.

"Honestly, I never thought I'd get any use out of the 'Obstetrics' portion," Stacey admitted. "You're the first pregnancy I've ever treated. Assassins do a lot more dying than reproducing these days. We're like an endangered species."

"Your first ever pregnant patient is a man?" Rebecca laughed. "Wild."

"By the way, Desmond, I should probably check your effacement." The medic saw his uncomprehending expression. "That's another thing you could learn from the book. Basically, in order for the cervix to open up-"

"Ugaah!" He recoiled.

"You better get used to the idea, okay? You'll have to experience a whole lot of opening up before this is over."

"Agggh, son of a bitch. Fine," he admitted grudgingly. "How do you check this facement thing anyway?"

Stacey was pulling on a pair of gloves. "How do you think?"

"Son of a bitch." Desmond glared at Rebecca, who was covering her mouth to suppress laughter. "Get out of here, you."

* * *

><p>Rebecca passed by William on her way to her workstation, and the elder Assassin stopped her to ask, "How's he doing?"<p>

"Same as before. Seems it was a false alarm. You'll have to wait a little longer to meet your grandson." She was secretly pleased at the unease she incited with those last two words. "Hey, what was it like when Desmond was born?"

His face shifted in an expression that Rebecca was tempted to describe as a pout. "I don't know. I wasn't there."

"You weren't there?"

"I was away on an assignment." Yeah, that was definitely a pout.

"You left your pregnant wife alone to go do Assassin stuff?"

"Janet was not **alone**, and furthermore, our mission had been in preparation for over a year, and I wasn't going to blow it off!"

"Okay, geez."

* * *

><p>Desmond knocked hesitantly on the door of his father's office. William opened the door and gestured silently for him to sit down.<p>

"So... um," Desmond began but was cut off by a curt sentence.

"It was a false labor."

"Yeah... Stacey says it's called, um, Braxen Higgs. Like, a practice contraction," he reported, fingers fidgety.

"Practice contraction," William echoed stonily.

"Yeah. Stacey says it's normal to get that a few weeks before... before the real deal." Desmond paused a beat before adding, "Yeah, 'normal', as if any of this is normal."

More silence. Then... "So it won't be happening for a while."

"Well, probably not. I, uh. My... The cervix..." He frowned and blushed slightly, then mumbled, "Cervix isn't even effacing yet."

William raised an eyebrow. "And that means what, exactly?"

"Yeah, I never heard of 'effacing' either. It's uh... it's what happens before dilating. It's not effacing yet, meaning my kid's not ready to come yet." Desmond looked at his father. Was that concern in his eyes? "Um. Dad?"

"Yes?"

"I, uh. The reason I wanted to talk... I... Do you..." _God this is so fucking awkward._ "You know how to change a diaper?"

"I haven't done so in many years." William's distant expression softened a tiny bit. "Not since you were an infant."

"But you remember how, right?" Desmond probed. "You can teach me?"

"Yes, I suppose I can." The older man exhaled. "I'll also have to teach you to wash them properly."

"Wash... diapers?"

"Yes."

Desmond scratched his head. "Since when do you wash diapers?"

William smirked slightly. "Cloth ones have to be washed and reused. We can't use disposables."

"Eeugh." Desmond felt more than a little queasy at the concept of reusing a previously used diaper. "You better have a damn good reason why we can't."

"Babies go through thousands of them," William explained, and Desmond now noticed he was avoiding actually saying the word "diaper". "I'm not going to ask Tom for a new shipment every week, and neither am I going to risk compromising the secrecy of this location by sending anyone out into town that often to buy more."

"Great. Just another fucking perk of being on Abstergo's Most Wanted list... Ah!"

"What was that?"

"I'm fine," Desmond assured him. "He's just wiggling around. It surprised me, is all. I thought he'd run out of space to move, 'cause he's been really quiet for a while."

William's mouth hung open slightly and he seemed ill at ease. Desmond couldn't figure out the reason. Not until he noticed the staring eyes. Eyes that were pointed at his distended stomach.

"Do you... want to feel?" he asked warily. "Feel him moving?"

Those eyes moved back up to meet Desmond's, seeming unsure.

"You can if you want." Desmond lifted his shirt.

His father shifted in his seat, but didn't quite get up.

Desmond smirked. "Come on, now's your chance, before he goes back to sleep or whatever." He paused, not quite sure if he should say the words that were on his tonguetip, then decided to hell with it, he'd go ahead and say them, who cares if it sounded asinine. "I think he wants to meet his grandpa."

Asinine or not, that did it. William stood and came around his desk, then squatted down in front of his son. An aged, trembling hand reached out and landed on the firm roundness of Desmond's pregnancy, seeking out the movements of the child within.

"Here." Desmond guided the hand upward to the appropriate spot. "I dunno what he's doing, but you can feel it better here."

"Fascinating," William breathed.

"Yeah... Kinda annoying for me, though. Urk." Desmond twitched as the kid jolted vigorously against his insides.

"I can imagine."

Desmond almost laughed. "No, I really don't think you can." The dance number, or whatever it was, came to an end and the uterine activity ceased. William stood up again, and Desmond stood as well.

"Um, Dad?"

"Yes?"

"Uh, once he's born... I do wanna take care of him, but I also wanna go back to being an Assassin."

"You haven't stopped being one."

Desmond lowered his eyebrows. "You know what I mean. I wanna go do missions and stuff. I don't wanna be stuck in here all the time. I wanna be part of things."

William looked stern. "Isn't that what you've accused me of before? Focusing too much on the Brotherhood, neglecting my parental duties along the way?"

Desmond tried to hold back his anger. "I'm not gonna neglect him! I just don't wanna be, like, reduced to some fucking nanny or something! I've spent all that time training with my ancestors, it'd be a waste if I didn't get to put those skills to use! Or am I just not important to the Assassins anymore, now that you've already used my stupid genes to get the Apple and save the fucking planet?!" He was yelling now; the attempted anger holdback was an utter failure.

William put a hand on his shoulder. "Calm down, Desmond. I'm just-"

"Just trying to control my life?!"

"Trying to help you think clearly!" The grip on his shoulder tightened. "Assassins' lives are dangerous. Doubly so if they're going out and assassinating people. What if you die out there?"

Desmond set his face firmly. "I won't. I've gotten pretty good at cheating death this past year."

"You've been extraordinarily lucky, I'll grant that. But luck runs out eventually. Do you want to risk leaving your son orphaned?"

"Of course I don't want him to be orphaned! You can give me, like, the less dangerous missions! Like the one you're giving Shaun, he's not a fucking fighter!"

"You can't do undercover ops," William rebutted. "Your distinctive scar and your idiotic tattoo make you stand out like a sore thumb."

"**I** stand out?! Spencer's like a five hundred pound gorilla and he has the goddamn Assassin logo as a tattoo!"

"Hence why he doesn't do anything that requires stealth."

"Ughh," Desmond growled. "Fine! I'll stay in and stay all safe and cozy! But you better give me something to do! Something **important**! I didn't wanna be dragged back into this Assassin shit after I left, but now I'm stuck in it for life, so I'd really prefer to be a useful part of it and not just some kid's dad!"

"I'll find some way you can continue to contribute, all right?" William released him, and tentatively patted his back. "But in the meanwhile..." He trailed off.

"Yeah, in the meanwhile, just keep being a freakazoid who's gonna shit a baby out his male vagina." Desmond stormed out of his father's office. "Fuck my life."


	27. Freerunning, Fluency, Fingerprints, Fib

July 4, 2013

Freerunning.

Not chasing anyone.

Not being chased.

Just running freely through the trees for the sheer hell of it.

The weather was perfect, sunny with a light breeze.

And as a bonus, his clothes- **his own** clothes today, not anyone else's- didn't feel tight or uncomfortable at all.

Life couldn't get much better than this.

However, it could get much worse, as Desmond was about to find out.

He leapt from a high branch and landed on a much lower one. That is to say, he landed and then immediately lost his balance due to a short sharp pain in his gut, and ended up somersaulting crazily onto the ground five feet below. _I'll have bruises tomorrow for sure_, he thought as he struggled dizzily to his feet.

As soon as he'd stood, though, the pain started up again and he had to sit back down. "Ow. Fucking ow." He gripped his swollen belly, trying to will it into not hurting. _Why'm I freerunning while pregnant anyway? That was a stupid idea._

"Desmond! Are you alright? What are you doing out here in the woods?!"

He turned to locate the source of the voice. "Connor?!" he squeaked.

The man drew back his hood, revealing a familiar face. "Yes, it is I."

"Holy shit, am I glad I ran into you. Agh." Desmond winced. "Well, I'm glad I ran into **someone**. I'm, urgh... I'm in kind of a situation here. Ohhh man. Ow." He leant back against a tree trunk and wiped sweat from his forehead. The refreshing breeze had vanished at some point. "I think my kid might be... oh fuck!" He swore at the unbelievable strength of the constriction he was feeling. "Yeah," he managed to croak weakly. "No doubt about it."

"Do not worry, I will fetch a doctor. Stay where you are." Connor hiyah'ed his horse and galloped away.

* * *

><p>"Ah sì, Signor Kenway was correct; you are indeed in the throes of labor," came the doctor's diagnosis, his face unseen behind the beaked mask.<p>

"No shit, Doc," Desmond grunted. "You gonna do something about it or just state the obvious?"

"Some amount of pain is to be expected, of course, but in this case I believe the child is unbalancing your humours and worsening your plight. I shall apply leeches to rectify this." The doctor produced a jar of wriggling creatures.

"Eww! I really don't think that's going to help! Connor, my man, can you get me a different doctor? Like, a **modern** doctor?"

"If you wish," Connor said, and snapped his fingers.

As he did so, the Renaissance dottore was consumed by a puff of smoke. When the smoke cleared away, the person within was indeed a modern doctor. But Desmond wasn't pleased by the change, and expressed this without ambiguity. "Fuck, not **him**!" He'd barely finished these three words when another, stronger contraction began.

"You don't sound well, Mr. Miles," Dr. Warren Vidic said with vicious mockery. "This wouldn't have happened if you'd stayed with us at Abstergo." He reached over storklike and tapped the contracting abdomen with a bony finger. "You've got something we want, locked away in that womb of yours."

Desmond scooted a few feet away, shaking off the pain long enough to say, "Get bent, Templar bastard."

"That's rich, coming from the bearer of an **Assassin** bastard," came the sneering reply.

"Well, sorry I couldn't marry his dad," Desmond shot back snidely. "'Cuz you guys drove him nuts and he fucking killed himself!" Then a more powerful pain washed over him, and his face twisted in agony, and he could barely hear Vidic's response.

"Yes, that is a shame. His ancestry still held so many secrets. And so does yours. But now, we'll have the chance to explore them both."

Desmond gasped, but the gasp had nothing to do with what Vidic had said. It was solely due to something new he was feeling, in addition to the unbearably powerful contractions. He felt something, something obscenely large inside him, being inexorably pushed down, excruciatingly stretching his altered anatomy. "Oh shit, it's coming! He's coming! He's coming now-ow-oww!" he howled, throwing his head back, and wishing he hadn't because now he saw Juno was there too, crouching on a branch above, a wicked grin on her alien features.

"Excellent." Vidic tented his fingers. "Oh, and don't worry about raising him. We'll take him off your hands. Really, who better to be our Subject Eighteen than the offspring of Subjects Sixteen and Seventeen?"

"He can't be born properly while you're still wearing those, though." Connor snapped his fingers again, causing Desmond's jeans to disappear.

"Hey, gimme back my pants, Connor!" He bolted upright, eyes ablaze, and was startled to see Rebecca staring at him from across the library, eyebrows raised.

"Oh, man. 'Cumming'? 'Give me back my pants, Connor'?" she repeated in slow amusement. "Damn, Desmond, can we trade dreams?"

"Geez..." Rubbing an ache in his back, Desmond took a few moments to orient himself in reality before answering. "Sure. If you wanna dream you're giving birth in the fucking forest and Warren Vidic is gonna steal your kid to dig through his DNA, be my guest."

Her face fell. "Oh. Never mind. That sounds a lot less sexy."

"No fucking duh." He propped himself up on the couch to look at the clock. "Three p.m. already?"

"Yes, three p.m. already," Shaun confirmed. He was sitting across from Rebecca, nose buried in some book, in a pose which seemed less like he was actually reading it and more like he was holding it up so he didn't have to look at Desmond. "Oh, and FYI, Bill's left."

"What, gone out to get fireworks or something?" he asked jokingly.

"No, he's gone to Missouri."

"Huh? Why?"

"Visiting another den there."

"Why?"

"Why, why, why?" Shaun mimicked cruelly, slamming down his book. "Christ, what are you, three years old? Use your brain, dipshit, he's the bloody Mentor, he has to go check in on the other locations now and again."

Desmond would have given him the middle finger, but his hands were occupied- one holding him up from the couch and one rubbing at the small of his back- so he just stuck out his tongue instead.

"Oh, real mature, Desmond, god, you really are three years old." The book blockade went back up.

"So he's just left without telling me."

"He told **us**. **You** were **asleep** all morning," Shaun snipped. "**Again**."

"Cut me a break, I've been ordered to take it easy." Desmond flopped back down. "Almost nine months pregnant here! Or did you forget?"

"I try my best to." was the testy reply.

He ignored that. _What the hell is Dad's problem? He was so obsessed with wanting to be there for me and now he's run off out of state on Assassin business, just like with Mom. Fuck it, I don't care if he's here for the birth or not._ The backache worsened and he grunted a little bit, and he suddenly couldn't stand being on the couch anymore, so he got up, unable to stop himself from grunting more. Then his stomach growled loudly, yearning for nourishment.

Shaun lowered the book slightly to glare at him. "Pardon me, but could you cut back on the noises?"

"Could you cut back on being a douche?" Desmond retorted. "Ugh."

Rebecca saw him wincing in slight pain and followed him out to the hall. "Are you okay? Is it, uh, 'time'?"

Facing away from her, Desmond balled his fists tightly. "God, will everyone please stop asking me if I'm 'okay'! I haven't felt 'okay' in forever! And no, it's not fucking 'time'! It wasn't yesterday, so I seriously doubt it is today! This'll be just another fake-out contraction. Real ones probably hurt a lot more."

"You sure?"

"Leave me alone! Wait, actually, no. Don't leave." Holding up a hand, Desmond turned on a dime and changed his mind. "Tell me what's the deal with Dad going to Missouri suddenly."

"I dunno exactly, but I think it's related to you and Junior. There's a big ol' den hidden in the Ozarks, where a bunch of lil' kidsassins and their parents live. It's kinda like 'the Farm 2.0', from what I hear."

Desmond crossed his arms. "And he wants to send me there? Nope, not happening. It's awkward enough with the six of you all knowing about this, I'm not letting anyone else find out."

"Chillax, your secret's not in danger. I'm pretty damn sure he's not sending you **anywhere** until you're done being pregnant."

"Whatever. When's he getting back?"

"Few days to a week. He mentioned some other stuff he's gonna check on while he's out."

"Whatever," Desmond repeated. "Is he gonna be okay by himself? Remember last time he-"

"Chillax," Rebecca repeated. "Spencer's bodyguarding him."

"Is 'bodyguard' a verb now?"

"Do dudes have babies now?" she asked as a response. "Oh by the way, I upgraded your database privileges from 'Read-only' to 'Read-write'. Bill said you were looking for something useful you could do while you're, y'know." She made a faint gesture at his belly, though this wasn't necessary for Desmond to grasp what she meant. "I figured you could look over the entries I made on Clay's ancestors and add in any missing info."

"Why do we need entries on them? They're nobody important."

"Hey, they're your family now."

Desmond raised a skeptical eyebrow.

"They're like... your great-great-grandparents-in-law or something. I think."

He chuckled. "You only get in-laws from getting married, stupid. The only way I'm related to Carlo et cetera is through Ezio, and that's a real stretch."

Rebecca shrugged. "Well, 'important' or not, we're kind of in the habit of making database entries on anyone you relive in the Animus. So I made entries. You can check 'em out and edit them, or not. Up to you."

"I'll pass. I'm sure whatever you put is fine. You did remember to write about the awesome part where Assassins saved Walde-"

"BOOGITY BOOGITY BOO!"

"Gah!" Desmond nearly jumped out of his maternity shorts- which had originally been pants, since most of Janet's pregnancy had taken place in the cooler parts of the year, but he'd fashioned them into shorts by cutting off the legs- and spun angrily around to face his surpriser. "Colin, what the fuck?"

"Don't scare him like that, Col, it's not good for Junior," Rebecca admonished.

The wiry young man ignored her and grinned impishly at Desmond. "You wanna keep being able to go on missions, don't you? Then you gotta be able to know when someone's sneakin' up on you."

"What, so creeping around the corner and scaring the shit out of me is supposed to be some kind of training exercise?"

"Yeah."

"So **you're** training **me** on how to be an Assassin? That's rich."

"We all have different skill sets," Colin shrugged. "I'm good at 'creeping'. You're good at throwin' knives and savin' the world with your DNA."

Desmond bristled. "Hey, I'm good at lotsa stuff besides that!"

"Like?"

"Where do I start? Climbing, freerunning, kicking Templar asses, horseback riding, motorcycle riding, a little bit of sailing, a lot of solving weird Animus puzzles, making all kinds'a bombs, oh and of course mixing all kinds'a drinks! Plus fighting off motherfucking wolves and bears and tons of other shit!"

"Not to mention gestating," Rebecca added, drawing dagger-eyes from Desmond. "Oh, did I say 'gestating'? I meant... translating. Yeah. That's what I meant."

"Right, Mr. Bleeding Polyglot, translatify me something then," Colin challenged.

"What, you don't believe her?" Desmond searched his brain for a suitable example. "Um... Nic nie jest prawdą, wszystko jest dozwolone."

Rebecca and Colin both looked at him dumbfounded. "What was that?"

"The Creed in Polish. Kredo asasynów," he answered smugly.

"You better stick to English around Junior, else he'll be confused trying to learn to talk," Rebecca said.

Colin shook his head. "Naw, Beck, don't you know? Childrens' brains are mad absorbent. They can learn multiple languages super easy. I bet by the age of five, Baby Miles could be fluent in English, Arabic, Italian, Polish, and Mohawk."

"English, Arabiyyah, Italiano, Polski, and Kanien'kéha."

Rebecca rolled her eyes. "Okay, cut it out now, nobody likes a show-off."

"Well, he asked for a demonstration, didn't he?"

"Do you know what I'd really like a demonstration of?" Colin said. "Actually, it's the reason I came lookin' for you. Show me how to throw knives like a badass, like you were doin' the other day, you know?"

"Oh, yeah, sure," Desmond agreed with an eager smile._ Right! Training other Assassins with my mad skills! That's something I can do to help out without endangering myself! Why didn't I think of this before?_ "I'll give you a little lesson, but lemme eat something first. I kinda slept through lunch."

* * *

><p>"When did you ride a motorcycle in the Animus?"<p>

Desmond was about fifty feet away, pulling knives out of a target. When he returned to Colin with the knives in a basket, he asked, "Sorry, I don't think I heard you right. You said something about the Animus?"

"Which ancestor did you learn to ride a motorcycle from? You said that was one of your skills."

Desmond frowned slightly at the implication. "Look, dude, not **all** of my skills were spoon-fed to me through genetic memories. I learned to ride a motorcycle on my own, in Brooklyn."

"Oh, what model did you have?"

"Let's focus on your training right now, okay? Here's a dozen throwing knives, show me what you've got."

Colin took the basket. "Right, here I go."

Desmond fell into a lawn chair and zoned out a bit as he watched Colin's amateurish attempts. In truth, he'd never really had a motorcycle of his own, but had borrowed his roommate's. As far as the model, well, Reggie's had been a Softail Classic, but Desmond had had his heart set on a nice Honda Shadow. _I almost had the cash all lined up for it, too. Took so goddamn long to save up enough from my stupid bartender wages._

"How am I doin'?"

_And of course no fucker would give me a loan. Being born in a stupid secret enclave means you don't get a social or a birth certificate, means you can't get a credit card or bank account or anything._

"Whoops, that last one really missed the mark."

_Really had to sweet-talk the DMV lady to even let me **start** applying for the license without a valid "proof of identity". And then the fucking Templars got me by my stupid fingerprints._

"Hello? Preggo Knife Master?"

_How the hell did they have my fingerprints on file anyway? I wasn't ever arrested and fingerprinted._

"Yo, DESMOND!"

He finally jolted back out of his brooding cogitations. "Wha- Oh, sorry."

Colin looked down at him intently. "Is that another skill of yours? Falling asleep with your eyes open?"

"I wasn't asleep. I was just lost in thought."

"You sure? You're not," he wiggled his fingers in the air spookily, "**seeing things** again, are you?"

Desmond got out of the chair to face him at eye-level. "I'm fine, okay? Don't assume every single thing is a Bleeding Effect! Haven't even touched the Animus in a month!"

"All right, all right, you're fine. How about my knifing skills? Are they 'fine' too?" Colin jerked a thumb behind him at the target range. "Two out of twelve isn't bad, right?"

Desmond surveyed the scene. Yes, two knives were in the target but only just barely. Five were scattered on the ground around it. Three more had flown far, far past the target, and one had landed in the dirt halfway to it. "Um. I only see eleven. There were twelve, weren't there?"

"Yep. Look behind you."

He turned and saw the final knife was buried in the burlap skin of a practice dummy which stood nearer to the building.

"Yeah, IDEK how that happened," Colin admitted with a shrug.

* * *

><p>July 5, 2013<p>

**Hey Dad. You better stay safe on your stupid trip to Missouri. Don't go getting yourself killed or kidnapped before you teach me how to do diapers. Speaking of not getting killed, that Colin guy doesn't know the first thing about fighting. I mean, he can clean, dissemble, and reassemble guns like a mofo, but he can't use them for shit. So I'm starting giving him training sessions. I offered to train Shaun too, but he**

"Diapers? You guys expecting a baby up there?"

William stiffened at the voice. "Olivia. Please don't read over my shoulder."

She huffed in annoyance, but obligingly moved away. "Fine, I didn't know I'm not allowed to know what's going on in Vermont."

"You're allowed to ask me about it. You're not allowed to invade my private emails. What kind of a teacher are you if you don't understand that sort of distinction?"

"If it's so private, then you should read it in private," Olivia contended.

"Well, until you snuck up behind me, that's what I was trying to do."

She sat down across from him. "Come on, stop stalling and dish. Who's having a baby?"

William's brain went into overdrive keeping his face impassive while he tried to come up with a plausible answer. _Can't take too long to reply or she'll get suspicious. Can't just tell her it's Desmond. Why can't I just tell her it's Desmond? That's the truth. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. It's permitted to lie about things like this, isn't it? Things people won't understand. But maybe she would understand if I gave her the chance. But Desmond's emotional enough about this situation already. He'd really lose it if I let more people know the particulars. But making up a lie could complicate things later if she finds out the truth. But nothing is true._

After a couple of seconds which to him felt like an eternity, he decided on a response. "Desmond's girlfriend." _Name, name, she needs a name, fictional girlfriend, fictional name, but it has to sound real, come on come on why can't I think of a name? Lewis Carroll!_ Randomly recalling Shaun's gift at the baby shower, he seized on the inspiration. "Alice."_Goddamnit that sounds so fake, surely Olivia can tell that's a fake name, but I can't change it now, now I'm stuck with it!_ William tried restating the lie, hoping that repetition would make it more believable. "Desmond's girlfriend Alice is pregnant."

Olivia's eyes widened and she smiled. "Well, congratulations. When is she due?"

"He's due later this month," William said without thinking, then hastily added a clarification. "By which I mean, the baby boy's due. Alice is having a baby boy."

"You don't sound very convinced."

His throat went bone dry at these words.

"Yeah, it's pretty unbelievable, right?" She laughed softly. "Hah. There's all this unbelievable stuff we Assassins deal with, and we still can't wrap our minds around a little thing like the making of a new human. Especially when it'll be your own grandchild. I felt the same way when Mindy had Jonah."

William relaxed. "Yes. It's very... unbelievable." He looked down at his hand, remembering the sensation of the movements he'd felt. "Very."

"Hold on, due this month?" She tilted her head back a little, mentally calculating. "When did Desmond find time to be with Alice during all the excitement last year?"

The Mentor frowned slightly. "I didn't ask him for details on that point, Olivia." _And moreover, I can't give a plausible answer to that. I should have lied about the due date. Either that or I should have said it's Rebecca instead of making up this "Alice", at least Rebecca's already known to have cohabitated with Desmond in October. Can't change the story now though. Let's just hope she doesn't overthink it._

"Well, at any rate, congratulations again. We'll have to wrap up our business here soon so you can go back and not miss the big day!" She waved and walked out of the room.

William returned his attention to the screen. He was exceedingly glad he hadn't scrolled down to the rest of Desmond's email while Olivia was reading it, for it contained telling phrases like "Uterus or no uterus, I'm still an Assassin" and "I'm so fucking sick of wearing maternity clothes". _In addition to the diaper thing, I have **got** to teach that boy how to properly obfuscate a message._


	28. Names

"So, Spencer, I heard the big news!" Olivia said, running up and clapping the large man on the back.

"Wha?" He looked at her quizzically.

"Desmond's about to be a daddy!" Spencer's eyes bugged out slightly. "Oh, don't tell me you didn't know?"

"No, I knew. I just, uh... how did **you** find out?" _She's not freaked out at all?_

"Oh, well, I was kind of sort of accidentally peeping at Bill's email, and it mentioned diapers and so I wheedled it out of him after that." Olivia covered her mouth. "Ooo, was it supposed to be a secret?"

"Um. Yeah," he stammered. "Obviously."

"Oh, but why? Why keep happy news like that under wraps?"

"Well, for one thing, Desmond's not a hundred percent 'happy' about it, as you might well imagine." At this point, Spencer happened to spot William in his peripheral vision, some twenty feet away, making a frantic "zip it" gesture across his mouth.

"Ohh... I see." Olivia squinted slyly. "This was an unplanned pregnancy, eh? Desmond doesn't want the baby? But Alice is going ahead with it? Very interesting."

_Shit, who's this Alice?_ Unsure how to extricate himself from the conversation, Spencer glanced at William. Was he trying to say something in a half-assed version of sign language? A... L... I... C... E... Then he formed his fingers into a heart shape, then continued signing. D... E... S... M...Realization clicked in Spencer's brain. "Uh, nope! Alice and Desmond are all cool now! He was, uh, just freaked out a little when he found out she was pregnant! Because, you're right, it **was** unplanned, and he wasn't sure he'd be a good dad and stuff! But like I said, everything's cool now! Um, can we talk later, I think Bill wants me for something!" Spencer dashed away.

* * *

><p>"No, look, you're still throwing way too wildly, Colin." Desmond grabbed the younger Assassin's arm and took the knife from him. "Watch me again." He was in mid-throw when he suddenly gasped and let go of the projectile too early, sending it flying high into the treetops.<p>

Colin's gaze followed the knife's errant trajectory. "How is that any better than what I was doing?"

"Agh. I didn't **mean** to do that!" Desmond growled, gripping his stomach. "Stupid uterus messing me up. Ah. Urgh."

"Contraction, eh? Your little guy finally makin' his debut?"

"No, it's..." Desmond took a slow breath through gritted teeth. "It's another fucking practice one."

"Sure about that, big guy?"

"Yeah. Pretty damn sure. See, it's going away already." He ground the heel of one hand into his abdomen to chase away the faintly lingering pain.

"I don't 'see' anything. Just a pregnant Assassin." Colin paused a moment. "But I suppose it makes sense. Practice knife throwin', practice contractions."

Desmond guffawed briefly. "Yeah, if only the one wouldn't interfere with the other."

"What's the status on your cervical effacement?"

He shot Colin a look of confusion and anger, not sure whether to say "I don't want to talk about that" or "How the hell do you know that term?"

Colin answered the latter without it being asked. "I've been readin' up a bit on the female reproductive system lately, for obvious reasons. It's kinda fascinatin', the whole process, IMO."

"You think it's so fascinating, why don't you do it yourself?"

"Well, I'm not the Chosen One with a bunch of First Civ genes, so I didn't get to go on a wacky adventure and have a close encounter with Juno the fertility goddess."

"She's a fertility goddess?" Desmond pronounced the last two words with disgust.

"Well of course you and I know she's not actually an anything goddess at all, but yep, that was considered one of her main aspects."

"Why am I just now finding this out?"

"When would you have preferred to find it out?"

"Fuck, I don't know." Desmond picked up another throwing knife and tossed it idly from hand to hand. "Guess it doesn't matter. It's not like I'd have been able to predict she'd knock me up. I mean who the fuck coulda seen that coming?" He hurled the blade away angrily, putting way too much spin on it. It twirled end-over-end and ultimately hit the target hilt-first, thunking harmlessly off the canvas.

* * *

><p>Spencer and William eventually found time to themselves to formulate a backstory for "Alice", in case they were questioned further. "I feel like some sort of criminal rehearsing his alibi," Spencer admitted.<p>

"Well if you want to go out there and tell Olivia about Desmond's," in lieu of actually saying the word "uterus", William gestured at his lower torso, "then be my guest!"

"I wasn't suggesting that!"

"Then you'll have to live with a bit of a guilty conscience," the Mentor said pointedly. "Right, so let's go over it once more. Her name is?"

"Alice de Rossi."

"Desmond met her?"

"While he was being Ezio."

"Yes, after she happened to innocently stumble upon the warehouse hideout."

"That's not really very plausible is it?"

"Do you have a better suggestion?"

"I'll let you know if I come up with one."

"Right, so Desmond learned Italian and romance from syncing with Ezio, so one thing led to another..."

"And now they're having a baby when they haven't even known each other for one whole year. I'm telling you, Bill, this isn't a very believable character."

William's response was a fast-paced stream of words, so quiet as to be barely audible. "It's much more believable than 'Juno and/or Kaczmarek altered Desmond's body to impregnate him, and we were fairly disturbed by this when we found out but we couldn't terminate the pregnancy so he had to lump it, but now he actually seems to tentatively like the thought of becoming a father, despite all', isn't it?"

"Well, honestly," Spencer held his thumb and forefinger a few millimeters apart, "that's only a **teeeny** bit more far-fetched than 'some random Italian girl found their super-secret hideout and Desmond immediately fell in love and got her pregnant and also she's joined the Brotherhood but we never bothered to tell anyone that she even exists.'"

William narrowed his eyes. "Perhaps. But you know how he'll react if we tell anyone the full story."

"Well... yeah."

* * *

><p>July 8, 2013<p>

"Oy," Colin said suddenly after dinner that night, "I wanna show you guys something."

"Hm, what is it, Col?"

"Altaïr," he said, waggling his eyebrows.

"Altaïr?" Desmond asked, unsure if he'd heard correctly.

"Yeah, come on, then." Colin gestured for Shaun, Desmond, Stacey, and Rebecca to follow him outside.

"Altaïr... is out here?"

"Have you drawn a picture of him on the side of the house or something?"

"Oh! I get it." Shaun smirked triumphantly, as if he'd just solved a tricky riddle, and then looked skyward.

"Yeah, Shaun's got the idea!" Colin said jovially. "Over to the east-southeast." He pointed just above the forest canopy.

Stacey and Rebecca squinted. "Uh. In the sky?"

Desmond shook his head. "Sorry, dude, even with Eagle Vision, all I see is a bunch of stars."

Shaun was sniggering heartily.

"Hey, come on, let the rest of us in on the joke!"

"Altaïr is the name of a star, you dolts," the historian laughed. "There. That bright one. Part of the constellation Aquila."

"What, like Ratonhnhaké:ton's boat?"

"Yes, like Ratahaka... like Connor's boat."

"Ha-ha, you can't pronounce it!" Desmond shoved Shaun playfully. "See, I have to remind you from time to time, you aren't perfect!"

"So, which came first," Rebecca wondered, "Altaïr the Assassin or Altaïr the star?"

"The star's hundreds of millions of years old," Colin answered, "but it wasn't given its name until sometime in the sixteen-hundreds."

Desmond grinned. "So it was named after my ancestor? Because he was so awesome?"

Colin's shrug was barely visible in the dusk. "Possibly."

"Or else it's a coincidence," Shaun offered. "They could just both be named 'The Bird' in Arabic. I mean, I share a name with Shaun Dingwall, but I'm not named after him."

Rebecca laughed. "What the heck kind of name is 'Dingwall'?"

All this talk of names reminded Desmond that he still had no idea what to name his son. _Hell, maybe I should just go with Desmond Jr... No, that sucks, that's stupid!_ He almost slapped himself upside the face for even considering it.

* * *

><p>July 11, 2013<p>

"You know, I've been researchin' more on that Charles Dodgson guy," Colin said. They had finished training for the day, though not much progress had been made.

"Who?" Desmond queried, setting down his pencil, with which he'd been intending to jot down name ideas, but had so far only made idle doodles.

"AKA 'Lewis Carroll'. Did you know he did tons of other stuff besides write stories? He was a mathematician, logician, and photographer too!"

"Mm," Desmond said, not really listening. _Lewis Miles? Lewis... Miles... Nah._

"And he also invented the idea of Scrabble! A real jack of all trades, that Charlie!"

_Charles Miles? No, **definitely** not. Connor Miles? No, calling him after an ancestor would be a massive mindfuck. And I sure as hell want him to have a happier life than Connor did._

"Oh, look who's back!" Colin pointed behind Desmond.

"Hey, Dad," Desmond greeted him blandly, not bothering to look, for it was obvious who it must be.

"Hello, son. How have you been?"

"Oh, y'know, same old, same old. Still all pregged up, obviously. Wanna kill whoever decided to go around saying this shit lasts nine months, when it's actually a little longer than that," Desmond said, a slight edge to his voice. "How's things down in Ole Miss?"

"'Ole Miss' is Mississippi, not Missouri," Colin corrected him.

"Shut up, Col, he knows what I meant."

"Everything's fine," William said flatly. "No real problems."

"Just fake problems?" Desmond joked. He heard someone setting down a heavy box, and turned around to see Spencer. "Hey, Spence, what'cha got there?"

"Um... well, when the Ozark Assassins heard about your kid, they wouldn't let us leave without giving us a bunch of kid supplies." From out of the box, he held up a couple of jars of baby food. "I mean, I told 'em we've got some kid supplies already but... yeah."

"Oh, that's nice of them." Desmond said, and turned back to his meal.

A few short moments later, once the implication of Spencer's words had sunk in, he spun angrily back around to rage at his father. "Goddamnit Dad, you told them I'm having a kid?! That's fucked up! I thought I made it clear this was on a need-to-know basis!"

"Calm down, Desmond," William said in what he hoped was a soothing voice. "I told them it's your girlfriend Alice who's expecting."

"My girlfriend Alice? Why'd you make up something stupid like that? Why not just keep your frickin' lips zipped and don't say **anyone's** expecting!?"

"Well, I had to tell them something after Olivia saw the 'diapers' comment in your email!" William said, the soothing voice gone, replaced involuntarily with his more usual nagging tone. "I'd have thought with this recent Templar cyber-security situation, you'd have learned to be a little more circumspect in your communications!"

"Who the hell's Olivia and why was she reading an email I sent to **you**?" Desmond sulked.

"She's the head childcare professional at the School-"

"And she's the nosiest gossip I've ever run into!" Spencer finished. "You're fucking lucky she didn't find out the truth of your pregnancy! The whole world would've forgot all about that Snowden dude, and 'A Goddamn **Man** Gets Pregnant' would be the new headline sweeping the globe!"

Desmond wrinkled his nose. "Fine. Thanks for the cover story, I guess."

Colin steered the conversation back on track. "So, do tell about this Ozark place. You said it's called..."

"The School," William replied. "It's the den where most Assassin children live, now that the Farm is kaput. More efficient to keep them all in one location."

Desmond rolled his eyes at the mention of efficiency. "What if they just wanna be children, not 'Assassin children'? And what if they don't wanna be 'kept' there, huh? Did you think about that?"

"I suppose **you** have a better idea? What would **you** do when Assassins have children? Kick them and their parents out of the Brotherhood, tell them 'Don't come back until your kid's grown up and **wants** to come back?'"

Desmond opened his mouth to respond, but seemed to have lost his voice.

"That's what I thought. Don't forget, I've been running the Assassins longer than you've been one, longer than you've been alive. You may have relived some of Ezio's memories, but that doesn't automatically grant you the experience of a Mentor. And things have changed quite a bit since the Renaissance. Templars are everywhere these days, and we have to value the secrecy of our dens far above the whims of our children."

"Fine," Desmond said curtly, then put a hand on his chest. "What about **me**, though? What if I don't want to move to Missouri?"

William allowed himself a thin smile. "You thought the whole reason for my excursion is because you're expecting? That's only partially correct." He sat down at the kitchen table, his posture relaxing. "I did need to check in on the School, to make sure it was still safe, to make sure I'd feel comfortable having my son and grandson live there." The smile trembled slightly.

_Shit, yeah. This kid is his grandson_, Desmond remembered, though he hadn't actually forgotten it. _That's gotta be blowing his mind almost as much as it being my son is blowing mine._

"It's a nice place, Desmond," Spencer said. "Real secure, well-stocked, plenty of people to help out with things. Way bigger than this joint."

"You don't have to go there if you don't want to," William said. "But I think you should seriously consider it. After he's born, of course. I think it'd be a better place for him to grow up."

"But... but I don't know any of those people, and they don't know me!" Desmond blinked rapidly, fighting back tears. _Tears? What the hell? Fucking hormones again!_ "Forget it. I'll rather stay here with you guys. It's safe enough here, right? Or else we wouldn't still be here!"

His father nodded. "You're right, of course. And we do have all these childcare supplies here already."

"Right! So there's no need for me to leave!" Desmond huffed. "So you guys were just wasting your time with that trip."

"It was **not** a waste of time, Desmond," William said crossly. "As I said just a minute ago, your situation is only part of the reason for this excursion. We also visited with the DC and Kentucky dens, as well as checking out the Grand Temple again."

"You went back there? What for?"

He nodded again. "Yes, I just wanted to see it again, make sure things were as we left them."

"Ugh. I never wanna go within a hundred miles of that place again." He felt a single solid **thump** from inside his uterus, and he smiled placidly. "Heh. Kiddo agrees with me."

"We can certainly understand that, Desmond." William patted his shoulder and then left the room.

"Lemme guess, 'Kiddo' still doesn't have a name," Spencer jibed.

"No prizes for getting that one right, Spin-man," Colin said.

Desmond rested his head in his hands. "I've been trying. It's a hell of a lot harder than you'd think. I even spent hours looking through the database, looking through a buncha rosters of Assassins past and present, but nothing jumped out at me."

"Why does something have to 'jump out at you'? Just pick something!"

"Don't rush me, all right? I've still got plenty of time."

Trying to make eye contact with Desmond, Spencer leant over the table, making it creak slightly. "Uh, 'plenty of time' my ass, he's coming, like, next week, isn't he?"

Desmond ground his teeth together. "That's just an estimate."

"Dude. I could pick a name for you if-"

"Ugh, get off my case, man!" Desmond said, standing up. "He's **my** kid, I'll figure out a name **myself** when I'm good and ready!" His sleeves were uneven and he tugged one of them down a bit.

Spencer's eyes flicked downward and back up quickly. "Is... That's my shirt you're wearing, man!"

"Yeah, it is, so? You said I could borrow some of yours, didn't you?"

"Er... Yeah, I guess I technically did say that," Spencer said, backing off of the table. "Just... that's one of my nicer ones."

Desmond tried easing the mood a little. "Don't worry, I'll try not to get too many pregnancy cooties on it."

Colin snickered. Spencer resumed moving jars of baby food from the crate to the cupboards.

"And, yeah, I know I needa pick a name already... It's just... I dunno." Desmond shrugged emphatically. "It's like... since I had absolutely zero choice on carrying this guy, I guess I'm trying to really get my money's worth on being able to choose his fuckin' name." He sat down and picked up his pencil again, twirling it between index and middle fingers. "Maybe I'll get inspired after he's born, maybe right when I see his face I'll go 'Oh, he looks like a... da da da.'"

"Or maybe," Colin ventured, "he'll pop out and say, 'Ahoy there Desmond, it's me, Clay again!'"

"Urg." Desmond grimaced. "Don't remind me of that possibility please."

"But you wouldn't have to name him then."

"I don't care, I don't want a fucking Clay-kid."

"Thought you didn't want **any** kid."

"This conversation is **over**," Desmond declared. He grabbed his pencil and paper, stood up so abruptly that his chair crashed sideways onto the floor, then lumbered out of the kitchen, grumbling inarticulately.


	29. Old Mythologies

July 12, 2013

"So we just... like this... and then... um..." William scratched his beard. "No. That doesn't look right."

Desmond snorted. "Fuck yeah, of course it doesn't look right, it's Ezio wearing a diaper." His father had insisted that the proper technique needed to be visually demonstrated and not just verbally described, so they'd resorted to using the plush Assassin for practice.

"I'll start over," William said, undoing the fasteners. "It seems I'm a bit rusty."

"That's understandable. You haven't done this in, what, twenty-five years?"

"I got a little refresher course while we were in Missouri, but disregarding that, it's been twenty-four years." Precision was, and had always been, very important to him. "I remember the last time I changed you. April 1989."

"Oh man." Desmond tossed his head back with a small sigh. "I just realized I'll have to toilet train him too."

William chuckled empathetically. "Yes, but we've got a while before that time comes. Right, watch closely now. We fold this part here, and then make sure this isn't all bunched together, then secure it here... and here." He held up the freshly diapered doll. "Not that hard. Now you try."

"Um, okay." Desmond struggled a little with the safety pins as he removed the diaper, then slowly attempted to repeat the steps his father had shown him. "This is so surreal... My life is screwed up to the point where I feel more weird learning to change a diaper than, like," he fumbled around for an example, "...hiding from papal guards behind a bunch of prostitutes, or whatever. Somehow that kind of thing seems more normal."

"Ezio must have changed his fair share of diapers later in life."

"Yeah, he's a pretty nice guy, I'm sure he didn't leave all of that nastiness for Sofia." Desmond held up Ezio and mimicked his voice. "Oh, yes, Desmond, I was a veritable maestro di pannolini!"

"What was his son's name?"

"Marcello. But forget it, I'm not doing any M names. It just doesn't sound right to have the first and last name start with the same letter."

William shrugged. "If you say so. You've got it uneven here." He pointed to the doll, indicating the diaper coming up much higher in the back than the front.

"Yeah, it's supposed to be like that. For a newborn, at least." Desmond turned to look at William, an irrepressible upward curve in his lips. Smiling at his father: this, too, felt much more weird than it should have. "That dumb ol' book you gave me said so. 'Cause the cord stump's gonna be sticking out his belly button there." He tapped the Assassin insignia buckle on Ezio's belt. "Don't want it to get all chafed."

"I see." The smile was now returned in kind. "You're going to make an excellent father. That boy is lucky Juno picked you to have him."

"I guess so." Desmond put down the doll. "I mean, it's not like she coulda picked anyone else. I'm the chosen one with the special genes, after all." A strange expression passed over his face, wiping away the smile. "Shit. I wonder if this kid is part of some weird prophecy too, like I was."

"I suppose that's possible."

"Geez. I've been through so much crap because of that." Desmond sat down and eyed the burn scars that still marred his right arm: testimonials to the sheer overpowering energy that had been stored in the Eye. The scars were mercifully not painful anymore... most of the time. "I don't want any of that kinda stuff to happen to him."

"Well, if there is a prophecy about a boy born from two men and an Apple, I haven't heard of it, and believe me, I've been looking," Rebecca said, poking her head into the door. "So I wouldn't worry about it if I were you. You've got enough worries already, don'cha?"

"Right." Desmond nodded. "Hell, it's not like just being a regular Assassin is a walk in the park either. He'll have a hard knock life, prophecy or not."

A father's reassuring hand patted his shoulder. "But he'll have you to help him."

"Yeah, you and all your super Assassin skills." Rebecca ambled into the bedroom and knelt down to inspect some of the gifts newly arrived from the Ozarks. "Oh man, is that... Yeah, it is! A lil' amigurumi Assassin!"

Desmond leaned over for a closer look. "A **what** Assassin?"

"Amigurumi," she repeated gleefully, holding up a small crocheted toy. "It's, like, Japanese for 'totally cute thing-a-bob made outta yarn and stuff'."

"Huh." Desmond poked at the thing, nudging its hood off.

"Hey, leave his hood up, he needs it to blend." Rebecca placed the toy between two piles of diapers. "See? White against white. He's totally camoflauged."

William coughed. "Well, if we're done with the, uh, diapering lesson, I've got some work to do." He left the room.

"So, Becca, you've really been looking through history trying to find out about this?" Desmond asked as he removed Ezio's diaper and folded it back onto the pile with the others.

"Yeah, that's usually Shaun's domain, I know, but he's all squicked, remember?"

"Didn't find anything at all?"

"Well, actually, I found a **ton** of tales about male deities getting knocked up," Rebecca answered while poking around some more in the stuff piled in the corner of the room. "Enough that I'm starting to wonder if maybe the First Civvies didn't really have sexes. Maybe they all had the same reproductive capacity, and some just look more male or more female to human eyes."

"Interesting possibility, I guess."

"Yeah, but anyway I didn't come up with much in the way of **human** male pregnancy. The couple of myths that do reference it always frame it as a divine punishment."

Desmond frowned. "But why would Juno punish me? I helped her! Even though I didn't fucking **want** to."

Rebecca shrugged. "They say gods work in mysterious ways."

"Well, **I'd** say the gods must be crazy."

"Ooh, that was a really funny movie."

"Yeah, it was. Whatever." Desmond rubbed his aching neck. "Forget it. I don't wanna be thinking about Juno any more than I have to."

She held up something from the pile. "Hey look, they gave you a nursing bra."

"Heh, no, they gave **Alice** a nursing bra."

"Anyway, the reason I came to get you in the first place!" Rebecca dropped the bra and suddenly became businesslike. "It's your turn to make dinner."

Desmond contorted his face and grabbed his stomach dramatically. "Ooh, I'd really love to, Rebecca, but oh, ow, I'm having a major contraction, ow!"

"Pff, you are so totally not."

"Ow, I so totally am! Ooh, kiddo's totally-"

She cut him off midsentence. "You're a lot of things, Desmond Miles, but 'a good actor' isn't one of them."

He sighed. "Well, it was worth a try."

"Hey, you did say you didn't want to be a useless blob. Come on and be a useful blob at least." She took him by the arm and dragged him out to the kitchen.

* * *

><p>July 13, 2013<p>

"Stacey?"

"Yes, Desmond?"

"Um. To get ready for kiddo's birthday... is there anything... **special**... I should do?"

She considered the question for a bit. "I'm... not sure what you mean. I can't think of anything... You've read the applicable chapters in the book I gave you, right?"

Desmond broke eye contact with her. "Yeah, well... about that book..."

"I know it's a bit heavy on the jargon at times. Is there a part you don't understand?"

"No, I understand the words well enough," he said. "It's the illustrations."

She smiled gently in understanding. "I see. They're scaring you, because they look painful, right?"

He shook his head. "No, I'm not scared. Well, maybe a little. But that's not what I'm trying to say." He was turning slightly red. "The illustrations... They're... They're all missing something. That I have."

Now Stacey was a little amused. "Well, up until now everyone who gave birth was anatomically female, so of course there's no penis or-"

"No!" Desmond interrupted her, finally spitting out what he'd been dancing around. "I mean none of them have any **pubes**!"

"Oh." She leant back in her chair. "Ohh. **Now** I see. You thought you would have to shave? That giving birth required you to be hairless?"

"Well, why else would the pictures-"

Stacey ticked off reasons on her fingers. "Because it's simpler to draw. Because it's easier to label the anatomy. Because of cultural taboos against pubic hair, especially on women. Because it used to be routine to shave women before delivery but there's no medically sound reason to do so. Listen, Desmond, people have been giving birth for thousands of years. I don't know exactly when pubic depilation caught on but I'm betting it was pretty recent, okay?"

Desmond scowled. "Geez, way to make me feel stupid for asking a question! Washing your hands and not dying of the plague are pretty recent too, and those are hella 'medically sound'!"

"You'll be okay without shaving, Desmond."

His voice softened again, the concern not fully allayed. "But will **kiddo** be okay? Like, hygienically? I mean, you've seen my... down there. Maybe it's fine for everyone else's kid, but that's women, and women don't have as much-"

"Okay, okay," she said at last, tossing her hands up in defeat. "If it'll make you feel better, you can trim it shorter. But definitely do not **shave**. You'll get terrible razor burn and ingrown hairs and so on."

* * *

><p>July 17, 2013<p>

Today was it. Was **supposed** to be it, rather. Forty weeks since he'd touched the Apple of Eden, the faintest brush of skin against metal enough for the artifact to sense his unique genetic makeup. A genetic makeup that had inadvertently activated something, somehow allowing the formless, yet still formidable force that called itself "Juno" to seize control of Desmond's body, in more ways than one.

Stacey had told him that birth might occur anytime from roughly thirty-seven to forty-two weeks. But today was the official... urgh... due date. He still felt woefully under-prepared, but was nevertheless eager to get this damn pregnancy over with. _Not really looking forward to taking care of a baby, but it'll be a relief to get my body back at least._ Lately he tried to avoid moving around whenever possible, sure that he looked ridiculous. The lithe and smooth quality of motion he'd picked up from his training was long gone. _Can't really help it, can I, though? My balance is shot to hell with these thirty-odd extra pounds in front. Hopefully not too much of that is the kiddo. Sure don't want him to get stuck from being too fat to get out!_

Everyone was treating him like a ticking time bomb. He could feel their eyes on him all morning. It seemed that any time he made a sound, someone had to ask him "Is it starting?" or "Should I go get Stacey?"

The questions finally got to be too much for him. "No, nothing's starting! It's just fucking uncomfortable! You'd make weird noises too if all your organs were squished around unnaturally like this!" he yelled at lunch. "When it does start, I will fucking tell you it's starting, all right?!"

"You think you're uncomfortable now? Just you wait," Spencer said, almost tauntingly. "Man, I remember the screams of agony I'd hear from the health hut whenever we were getting a new lil' novice back on the Farm."

"Desmond is freaked out enough without your horror stories, Spence!" Rebecca shot angrily.

"Yes, and I'd rather not hear about that sort of thing either, if you don't mind!" added Shaun, looking a bit green.

After lunch, Desmond opted to stay at the table and read more of Lewis Carroll. "You sure you don't wanna read in the library?" Rebecca asked. "You'll get crumbs all over your book reading in the mess hall."

"Well, I'm probably gonna be hungry again in a little bit," he reasoned. "Might as well stick close to where the food is. Plus, I really like this particular chair. It's one of the few that I can still stand to sit in... Heh. Stand to sit." He chuckled slightly at the oxymoronic nature of the phrase.

* * *

><p><strong>Clink<strong>. A plate was set down in front of Desmond's face, awakening him. He didn't realize he'd fallen asleep.

"This for me?" he asked William, who nodded from across the table.

"Thanks." Desmond started in on the savory omelette, and ended up finishing it before the other man had even gotten halfway done with his own. He still didn't feel like getting up from his preferred chair, but he also didn't like the incipient awkwardness of just sitting there like a lump while William ate. So he decided to make conversation.

"Dad... what was it like? With... with mom?" he asked, a bit shakily. Wearing Janet's clothes had made him realize he hadn't really known her while she was alive, and he'd developed an itch to know more. And maybe stories of his mother's maternity could provide some insight into how best to handle his "manternity", as Colin had termed it.

William exhaled. "You mean... her pregnancy."

"Yeah... I mean, if you don't mind talking about it?"

His father looked into the distance, idly levering his fork, contemplating. Desmond wasn't sure if the conversation would continue. _Maybe it's still too hard for him to think about her. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything._

But William eventually did speak again, though not at his usual brisk pace. It seemed as if years of strong emotions weighed down the words, so that he had to expend more effort to get them out. "Well... we'd been putting off having children for some time... We would joke about it, even... about prioritizing Brotherhood over parenthood." He sighed. "But Janet... she kept seeing how happy everyone else was... with their families. The final straw was when Esi was born and... We finally decided we didn't want to wait any longer."

"And Esi is?"

"Spencer's younger sister. She... didn't survive."

Desmond didn't need to ask what he meant by that. It was the same fate that had befallen too many other Assassins.

William was staring into his glass of water. "And then we... We had some trouble... It took a while... before she conceived. I'll never forget the way she looked... when we found out she was finally pregnant. That smile..." He stealthily wiped a tear from his eye, but not stealthily enough to elude his son's perception.

Desmond remembered her smile, though only vaguely. The memories he had of his mother were hazy, diluted by the passage of time; the decade of real time plus those many decades synced through the Animus. The two of them were silent for several minutes.

The elder Assassin was the first to speak again. He sounded a little more composed now. "Janet named you after Desmond Tutu. Have you heard of him?"

"Uh. Kinda rings a bell. I think I saw him in the news a few years back. Obama gave him the Medal of Freedom or something."

"He's been bestowed many, many more honors than that, and deservedly so." Emphatic fork gestures accompanied this part. "That man has devoted his entire life to the betterment of humanity; he speaks out against every imaginable injustice."

_Sounds like she gave me some pretty big shoes to fill... Well, I did save the planet, but that wasn't really **me**, just my lucky genes._ "Is he one of us, then?"

"Your namesake is wholeheartedly Assassin in spirit, but we were never able to bring him into the fold, though not for lack of trying. However, his son Trevor..." William stopped and shook his head. "But that's a whole other story, the details of which I was never made privy to."

_I woulda never guessed there's things about Assassins that even he doesn't know._ This train of thought was cut short by a tension growing within him. The feeling built up quickly, tightening like a vise and causing him to grimace. This was a fair bit more painful than the practice contractions he'd been having.

William's eyes narrowed. "Desmond? Are you-" He bolted from his seat, not needing to finish the question. His son's body language was already more than enough of an answer. "Let's go."

A combination of the chair cushion being stuck to his ass after sitting there for hours, and the intense pain he was in, meant that when Desmond tried to get up, he found that he couldn't. He was reduced to limply holding out an arm and saying "Help" in a voice so weak it didn't even sound like his own. His father assisted him out of the chair and down the familiar- oh, oh so familiar, he could have found his way there blindfolded and backwards by now- path to the infirmary.

* * *

><p>"Dammit! Braxen Higgs <strong>again<strong>?! But it felt so strong!"

"It's 'Braxton Hicks'."

"Whatever. I wish it would just happen already so I can get back to normal," Desmond complained. He was lying on his side on a cot, same position he'd been in for the past half hour while waiting for more contractions and while enduring another infernal internal exam. The contractions had never come and the exam had revealed only slight cervical effacement.

Normal. The word he'd just used echoed in his mind, and he snapped his gaze to the medic. "I **am** gonna go back to normal, right Stacey?!"

"I can't say for sure, but I'd expect the uterus and," she rotated her hand in the air to imply the other addition to his anatomy, conscious that he didn't always react well to the term "birth canal", "...will probably stick around."

"Uugh! So much for ever having a girlfriend again."

Stacey responded kindly. "Don't write off romance so quick, Desmond. You could still find someone. If they really love you, they won't care what genitals you have."

He covered his face. "You're living in a dream world, Doc."

"I'm not saying it'll be easy to find such a person," she admitted.

Desmond rolled his eyes, then a thought struck him. "Shit, if I have to keep all this female junk, does that mean I'll get **periods** too?"

"Maybe?"

"Fucking **hell**... I'd rather grow tits than have to deal with periods!" he snarled.

"I can get you on birth control to suppress menstruation if need be."

"Birth control. Fucking hell."

* * *

><p>"It was just practice again," Desmond moaned to Rebecca and Shaun as he entered the kitchen. "Just a really really convincing practice." He slumped into a chair. "And Stacey says I'm probly gonna have a vagina forever. Fuck my fucking life."<p>

"Well, I **was** eating this," Shaun said, looking squeamishly at his tuna salad, "but then you had to go and say the v-word." He pushed the plate away.

"Well, excuuuuuuse me Shaun. God, I fucking hate this kid so much."

"Don't hate Junior, it's not his fault!" Rebecca patted Desmond's tummy affectionately. "It's okay, he doesn't mean it, he doesn't weawy hate you, widdle guy."

He batted her hand away. "I'll hate whoever I wanna hate, thank you very much. I hate Juno, I hate Clay, **and** I hate the..." His eyes closed tightly and his face twitched. "Aw, geez. You're right, Becca. Even if he **is** being a lazy bastard and won't hurry up and get his ass outta me... I can't hate the-**my** kid."

"That's wight!" she squeaked. "You wuv him, don't you!"

_I haven't even met him yet, how can I love him? Sure, I care about him, yeah. But "love" is a bit much_, Desmond thought, but didn't say. Instead he just said, "Stop the stupid baby talk."

"'Lazy bastard', eh? Blimey, he takes after his father already."

"Eat a dick, Shaun."


	30. Stimulation

_heads up, if you don't want to read a brief platonic sex scene, then skip the parts between the double horizontal rules_

* * *

><p>July 24, 2013<p>

"Uuugh," Desmond groaned when he saw the number on the scale. "Two hundred and eleven. Shit."

"That's not outside the healthy range for a full-term pregnancy, Desmond," Stacey said, tapping her pen against the desk. "In fact, every single time I've weighed you, you've been in the healthy range."

"Argh, but I didn't wanna go over two-ten!" he growled, falling into a chair with his arms crossed. "Well, really, I didn't wanna go over two hundred, but you said that was inevitable and you said kiddo needed me to not starve myself and shit... But I've been one-seventy-five, **maybe** one-eighty for a long time and I wanna get back to that as soon as I can."

Stacey flipped through some pages in his medical file. "You sure? The Abstergo report from September third says one-eighty-nine."

Desmond's face wrinkled sourly. "Well that's a fucking lie. Come on, Stacey, you can't trust what they say, they're **Templars**!"

The medic sighed and flipped back to the more recent portion of his file. "Okay, forty-one weeks, two hundred eleven pounds, fifty percent effaced, no dilation, sporadic Braxton Hicks. Anything else going on that I should know about?" She sounded almost bored.

"Same old shit. Nothing's happening except I'm gaining weight every day he's in there. Can't you do some medical thing to make him hurry up and be born? He's totally not premature anymore."

Thin lips curled in a slight smile and she shook her head in that gentle way she tended to do. "Sorry, Desmond. I think it's best we let it run its course. I don't want to risk inducing labor yet. Not while you're still somewhat within a normal date range for delivery."

He snorted. "You know, Stacey, I think I never want to hear the word 'normal' again."

* * *

><p>July 26, 2013<p>

Colin was getting pretty good with the throwing knives by now. Ideally, Desmond would have liked to move on to training him in some other skill, but his pregnant status prevented him from doing so. Freerunning, and indeed even regular running, had been physically impossible for many months. The Compound had no horses to ride and no ships to sail, and Desmond honestly didn't consider these two skills very practical in the modern day anyway. They didn't have any of the bomb-making components that Ezio had become familiar with in Constantinople, so that was out as well.

Firearms practice was attempted, but, though the two men's ears had been well guarded as always, the baby freaked the fuck out at the sound of the first shot, assaulting Desmond's innards with a violent flurry of kicks and punches. "Urgh... I guess he **can** hear what's going on outside after all," he said, curled on the ground in pain and stroking his belly in a desperate attempt to soothe the child. "Shh, kiddo, shh, I'm sorry..." _Shit, I hope I didn't mess his ears up from all the other times I've been out on the firing range._ "Shh. I'm sorry. I'll make it up to you, okay, you can scream bloody murder right in my ear when you get out, okay?"

"Pretty sure he'll do that anyway, Daddio," Colin opined.

"Yeah, crying really loud is kinda what babies are known for," said Spencer, who'd just now showed up on the range and seemed half-amused, half-concerned by the scene. "It's kinda their thing."

Desmond wasn't listening to them. "Shh, shh, kiddo, shh... Come on, you're hurting your daddy." The boy's fit of fear eventually quelled.

"You know," Colin pointed out, "he'll hurt you a lot more when he's bein' born."

"Pah, yeah, if it ever even **happens**!" Desmond sneered as he clumsily got back to a standing position.

"Maybe he's just waitin' for you to pick a name," Colin hypothesised.

"What, you think the uterus is somehow linked to my brain and it knows whether I picked a name yet?"

"Hey, who the hell knows, I'm just guessin' at possibilities. I mean, he got put in you by an unusual method, maybe his getting out will require thinkin' outside the box too."

"Fine. His name is..." Casting around for ideas, Desmond's gaze fell on the rifle he'd just fired. "Colt...on. Colton Miles." He drummed his fingertips impatiently on his belly for several seconds "See. Nothing's happening, I told you. Derr."

"Ag, maybe he's waiting for you to pick a **good** name."

"Fuck off, Spencer, you're the one who told me to hurry up and pick one. Anyway, I didn't mean it about 'Colton' anyway." Desmond brushed dirt from his shorts and legs, then addressed Colin. "Right, so guns are a no-go, kiddo can't handle it. Let's go back to the knives then."

Colin cracked his knuckles loudly. "Nah, I'm bored with that. I think I need to learn some physical attacks and such." He punched the air a couple times in demonstration.

"Ah, I do know some unarmed moves, that's a good idea."

Spencer put a hand on Desmond's shoulder. "Dude, I don't think you should be doing any sort of martial arts stuff right now."

"I'll be fine, Colin's not stupid enough to punch me in the gut, even if it is a pretty big target!" He tried to shrug off the hand, but Spencer was too strong. "And think about it: Being physically active might encourage kiddo to get a move on. We're not worried about premature labor no more, remember?"

The bigger man released him with a "Whatever. Go ahead if you insist."

But in the end, Desmond did discover that he had some trouble teaching Colin unarmed fighting properly. As much as he tried to maintain a fighting stance with fists raised, he kept finding his arms drifting downward, unconsciously shielding his unborn child.

"You know, it's kinda funny how protective you are of him. It wasn't all that long ago you hated his very existence, said he was 'a goddamn parasite'," Colin jibed, inciting a furious left hook from Desmond, which he dodged.

"Shut up!"

"But it's trufax." Colin evaded another swipe by stepping nimbly backwards.

"I don't care, don't talk about my kid like that!" Desmond stepped forward and thrust his fist forward as well, which the younger Assassin put an arm up to deflect.

But the punch carried too much momentum and Colin wasn't good enough at blocking. He fell backwards into the grass, rubbing the spot where Desmond's knuckles had struck him. "Ah. But I was just quotin' your own words, man."

"Well, **don't** quote any more of those type of words," Desmond grumbled forcefully, staring down at him. "Not within earshot of my kid."

"You know he can't understand words yet, right?"

"Yeah like I **knew** men couldn't get pregnant!" he shot back. "Like I **knew** he'd be born by now!"

Colin tried to say something like "All right, all right, calm down already" but Desmond was on a tirade and no words could be gotten in edgewise.

"Like I **knew** I'd die in the Temple!" A sweeping hand gesture accompanied each iteration of "knew". "Like I **knew** Lucy was on our side! Like I **knew **Templars weren't real! Tell me, Colin, do you **know** the first half of the Creed?"

"Of course. Stay your blade-"

Desmond interrupted him fiercely. "**Nothing is true**, Colin! It means you can't assume that what you **know** is actually right! It means even if it's right **today** it might not be right **tomorrow**, if it's right for **you** it might not be right for someone **else**! Do you understand, **novice**?!"

"You bet I do, I sure do," he answered, nodding frantically as he got off the ground, then managed a thin smile. "Dude, you sure are your father's son."

"Shut up, don't compare me to him!"

"You kinda did just go into full-on Mentorzilla mode there."

Desmond raised an angry index finger and opened his mouth to issue a rebuttal, but realized there was no denying it. "Heh. I sure did, didn't I?"

Colin fought the urge to say "Good to know that growin' a pussy hasn't turned you into one" and instead said, "Good to know all those preggo hormones didn't soften you up too much."

Desmond chuckled. "Nope, sure didn't." _They do, however, make me have crazy mood swings. I can't even remember what I was angry about thirty seconds ago._

"Buuut," Colin said slowly, "you might wanna try bein' a smiiidge more laid-back in your interactions with Colton."

"Who the hell- goddamnit, I told you guys, I am not naming him 'Colton'!"

* * *

><p>July 31, 2013<p>

Aside from a fake ID and cash for the bus fare, Shaun hadn't packed anything for his trip. "Everything you'll need is at the Montreal den," William had said. The other Assassins were gathered at the fence gate to see him off. Spencer was going to accompany him to the border, just for safety's sake.

It was the last day of July, and Desmond Miles was still pregnant.

"Guess this means I'll miss all the excitement," Shaun said. "Darn." It was obvious he was more than glad to be far away during the birth.

"Oh there'll be plenty more excitement after the kid's born," Rebecca assured him teasingly. "Sleepless nights, diapers, teething, the works!" Desmond's legs felt suddenly weak, and he had to lean on the wall.

"Maybe I'll decide to stay in Montreal for a decade or so."

"Maybe I'll join you!" Spencer added, clapping him on the back, apparently not having understood how seriously Shaun had meant the remark. "Come on, let's make like a baby and head out."

"Ugh, that was terrible!"

"Sorry, I couldn't resist."

* * *

><p>"You know, I heard somewhere that sex is supposed to stimulate labor," Rebecca said offhandedly. She and Desmond were hanging out in the library.<p>

Desmond couldn't believe his ears. "What, are **you** offering? With me, with all this going on with my body?"

"Hey, I'll try anything once. And sleeping with a pregnant man is pretty much the definition of 'once-in-a-lifetime opportunity'."

"Well, I haven't been laid in years- I mean, the actual present-day me hasn't- so I'd be down for it. If it gets this pregnancy mess over with sooner, then that's fucking icing on the cake." In truth, he'd pretty much gotten hard the moment she said 'sex'. "How exactly would we do it though? Logistically, I mean. Without everyone knowing."

"Yeah, they'd probably get all weird about it. Well, I got a soundproof room."

"What? Since when?"

"Eh, Shaun and I used to be a thing. Couple years back." She said it so matter-of-factly. Apparently the subject didn't stir any emotions in her. "So I rigged up a way for us to get our groove on all stealthy-like."

"I should have guessed you guys were exes." Desmond hoisted himself up from the couch with surprising speed. "Let's go, then."

"What, now? Somebody's an eager beaver!"

"What part of 'haven't been laid in years' did you not get? I'm still a man, remember!" A sudden and horrendous thought occurred to him. "And I'm only gonna use my man parts, got it?!"

"Of course, geez!"

The soundproof room ("Not completely soundproof," she later clarified. "Like, eighty-five percent, I'd wager.") turned out to be a side room off of the area where the Animus and Animus accessories were kept.

"Okay, now we gotta tackle another logistical problem here." She indicated his stomach.

"Yeah, I, uh..." He was starting to sweat. "I need to be... on top, I guess."

"Of course. You're the man, remember?" she said, half-teasingly, beginning to undress.

_God, this is surreal. Me and Rebecca. Didn't I wet dream about this, like, a majillion times?_ His mind flashed to another recurring fantasy he'd used to have: Lucy. That skirt and tights she wore at Abstergo... The way her body felt as he held her close ascending the ropes underneath Monteriggioni... That clingy sleeveless shirt...

Then suddenly the next image was of that same shirt pierced by a Hidden Blade. _No, shit, don't think about her, don't think about that! Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca, way way sexier because she's not a Templar!_

The not-Templar noticed his discombobulation. "Uh, I know how you feel about this question, but... are you okay? Emotionally, I mean."

"I'm fine. I just..." _Oh it's nothing, I was just thinking about some other sexy chick, a friend of yours actually, who I was forced to murder because she was secretly evil._ "Let's do this already."

Fully naked by now, she helped him out of his clothes. "Wow, you're already ready already."

"I can't even see it, but I'll take you at your word."

"Well, before we go any further, let's make sure you won't make **me** pregnant," Rebecca said, producing a condom from somewhere. Hardly able to keep still, Desmond hissed at the way it felt as she rolled it onto his shaft.

"All right, where do you want me?"

Not trusting himself to form a coherent sentence, he opted to answer her nonverbally, and pointed to the mattress.

"Like this?" She laid down on her back and wriggled playfully, making her breasts shake.

"Ffffyes!" Desmond gently lowered himself down onto his knees and tried to align his aching cock with her alluring snatch. The task was difficult with his view being blocked by that sphere of flesh.

"Woah! Not in the mood for foreplay, huh?" she observed when she felt him probing at her entrance.

"Nnnh," he replied, shaking his head.

"Well, I am doing this for your benefit, but dry sex won't be fun for either of us. Lemme get a little lube up in there first."

He sat back down on his naked ass and watched her equally naked ass as she got up and rummaged in a drawer. "Fucking hell, Rebecca. I could cum just from this show you're giving me."

"Well, thanks for the compliment, big boy, but try to hold it in for now, 'kay? Right, here it is." She retrieved some lubricant and slathered it generously onto herself, then laid down again. "You are clear for liftoff."

Deigning to ignore this strange comment, Desmond gradually inched his hips forward to slowly penetrate her. _Oh fuck, she's so amazing, so tight, so warm, this is awesome, sex is awesome, awesome awesome awesome!_ He withdrew equally slowly before moving in again, taking his sweet time to savor the sensations he hadn't experienced in so long. Lucy was gone from his mind now. He took hold of one of those glorious boobs _oh my god so soft and warm and incredible_ and thrust forward again _oh god oh god oh god-_

"Unh, c'mon... can't you go any faster?" Rebecca cajoled.

"Ah! Ngh, can't... oh fuck!" With the pregnancy hormones running rampant through his body, he was already having a hard time staying in control, and her provocative words were the last straw that sent him over the edge. "Beccaaa**aahhh!**" Desmond arched his back as he cried out, the posture making his ridiculously swollen abdomen look even larger.

He squeezed her breast so tightly she yelped in pain, "Gah!" and pried his hand off.

Desmond panted heavily as he rode the final ebb of his orgasm. "Ohhh... maaan..."

"When I said go faster, that wasn't what I meant." Rebecca extracted his spent dick from herself, sat up, and disposed of the condom with practiced swiftness. "Now how's about you be a gentleman and get me off too?"

"Agh... I..." He gripped his chest, trying to calm his racing heart. "Lemme... catch my breath first... Oh fuck!" He doubled over in pain.

Rebecca grinned. "A-hah, did it work? Are you contracting?"

_Oh, right. That's the whole reason we were doing this_, he dimly recalled, his brain hazy with post-sex fog. "Uhh... feels like it."

"Let's make ourselves presentable so you can get to the infirmary. And you still owe me an orgasm!"

Desmond sat down on the mattress and began to dress himself while waiting for the pain to subside. "Right, we'll... we'll have to do this again sometime."

* * *

><p>"Staaaa-ceeeey!" Rebecca called, sing-song. "Guess who had a con-traaac-tion!"<p>

* * *

><p>It turned out to be a false alarm. Again. "Stupid practice contractions. Haven't I had enough damn practice!?" he complained, arms crossed in a pout.<p>

"This should cheer you up, though." Stacey gestured to his abdomen. "It's a bit... lower down. And rounder."

Desmond remembered this from the books he'd read, and his whole face lit up with surprised excitement. "Holy shit, you mean kiddo's 'dropped'?!"

"Yes, in layman's terms, he's 'dropped', or in medical terms, 'engaged'."

He cackled joyously. "Fuckin' A!"

"You seriously didn't notice?"

"Well..." His left hand rubbed over his belly, taking in its altered shape, while his right index finger scratched the scar on his lip as he thought back over the past few days. "I **have** noticed it's harder to walk lately. I mean, not like it was totally easy up to now!" he clarified. "It's like something weird is up with my hips."

"Let me see." The medic poked at said hips for a minute. "Oh, your pelvis is loosening."

Desmond scratched his head. "That doesn't sound good."

"No, it's good. It means your body is getting ready for childbirth. Men have smaller pelvic outlets than women, and even women's pelvic joints separate a bit towards the end of pregnancy to accommodate the baby. Yours are having to separate even further."

"Geez... I'm glad about that and all, I mean, I'm glad he'll have more space to get out easier, but are there gonna be any **more** weird changes to my body? If you could tell me ahead of time, that'd be nice."

"I'm pretty sure if you were going to develop breasts it would have happened by now."

He made a face. "Well it hasn't, thank god! Even if it did, I am not gonna fucking breastfeed **anybody**!"

"It'd sure be more practical. As it stands right now, feeding him is going to be an additional strain on our resources."

"Yeah, well, sorry about that, but this is kind of a strain on me too!" Desmond snapped, then caught himself before flying into another rant about how he never asked for this and it wasn't his fault and so on. He took a slow breath to calm down and then managed a smile. "Anyway... Kiddo dropped, and my hips are all loose, so that means he'll be born soon, right?"

Stacey nodded and he hopped off the cot, practically skipping down the hall with glee. _Shaun's outta my hair, **and** I got laid, **and** kiddo's gonna be born soon! This is the best day I've had in a long **long** time!_

* * *

><p>hope the sex scene wasn't too painful to read orz<p>

by the way, there will be four more chapters

a sequel is also under development :D


	31. Alphabet

August 2, 2013

Spencer pulled a WTF face when he saw Desmond, or more precisely, when he saw Desmond's huge bulge. Though it wasn't any huger than it had been before, just the fact that it was still there shocked him. "Jesus! You're **still**-"

"Yeah, obviously."

"I thought for sure he'd be born by the time I got back."

"Well, he's not."

There was an uneasy pause of several seconds. "Well, have you at least pi-" He stopped due to the piercing glower from Desmond. "...That's a 'no', then."

"Get off my case about the name thing already, will ya!" Desmond said irritably. Then, in a more composed manner, he explained, "I figure maybe if I stop thinking about it all the time, it'll come to me on its own."

"Um. I brought a couple newspapers." Spencer tossed a _Burlington Free Press_ and a _Montreal Gazette_ on the table, both of which had already been rifled through and clumsily reassembled. "Got 'em for the long bus ride, but I hung onto 'em in case you guys might be interested in seeing the civilian point of view." He sat down next to Desmond and tapped the front page of the _Gazette_. "Buncha shit still hitting the fan in Syria. I bet the Levantines have their hands full."

"Turmoil in the Middle East, eh? Not much's changed since 1191," Desmond said, then swiveled his head up and sniffed. Twice.

"You got a cold?" Spencer asked.

"No. You got Taco Cabeza?" Barely a question, mostly a statement of fact.

"Uh. Yeah."

"'Ja bring me any?"

"Uh. No."

"Maaaan." Desmond rubbed one hand forlornly over his hair and the other over his swollen middle.

Spencer breathed on and then smelled the palm of his own hand, detecting nothing. "Dude, you really smelled-"

"No I read your fuckin' mind, derr, of course I smelled it. Can ya go back there and get me some chimichangas?"

"Uh. I don't think so."

"Pleeease," Desmond begged, "I'm like super duper craving some cheesy greasy meaty junk, and alls we got here is a bunch of healthy crunchy survivalist junk."

"Weren't you whining the other day that you're too fat?"

"Hey, I am a **healthy weight** for someone with a whole other **person** inside!" he contended, wagging a finger as he spoke. "Plus, I read you're supposed to indulge preggo cravings, 'cause it could have some vitamins or shit that kiddo needs! And **furthermore**, spicy food's supposed to be good for kickstarting labor!"

"Ag, you can stop now, I get the drift." Spencer held up his hands in surrender. "Look, if **I** go back to the same Taco Cabeza I was just at, it might draw suspicious attention, and there's not another one anywhere close, but, look, I will try to get Rebecca or Colin or someone to go grab you some enchiladas."

"Chimichangas!" Desmond corrected fiercely.

* * *

><p>"Bean and cheese chimichanga," Rebecca announced, handing it over to Desmond with a flourish. "Bon appetit."<p>

He tore the foil off and stuffed one end into his face. "Awmagadifgoo!"

"Hey, don't talk with your mouth full."

Desmond fell silent, closing his eyes in bliss as he chewed and eventually swallowed the hunk of fried burrito. Then he repeated himself more understandably. "Oh my god this is good."

"You got some stuff dripping on your mom's shirt there, bud." Rebecca pointed.

He dabbed at the splotch with a napkin. "Did you get any hot sauce packets?"

"Yeah, a few." Rebecca dumped the contents of the greasy paper bag onto the table. Desmond grabbed all three packets and splurted them in quick succession over his meal, causing her to wince. "Damn, you like it hot. My tongue's burning just looking at that."

Desmond took another bite, and almost immediately his eyes started watering. He swallowed as soon as he could. "I don't like it **this** hot. But I'm trying to make kiddo get outta there."

"You know the uterus and the stomach aren't connected, right?"

"Stomach's right on top of the uterus. They gotta have some connection, how else would the cravings happen?"

Rebecca sighed. "Whatever. Maybe you're right, maybe when you're shitting your guts out from this spicy stuff you'll shit Junior out too."

Desmond gagged. "He's not coming out of my **ass**, that's disgusting, why would you even say that Becca?"

"C'mon, it's just an expression. Don't tell me you never heard the expression, 'shitting out a kid'?"

"It's a **disgusting** expression."

"Vaginal birth is kind of disgusting too."

"Let's talk about something else now!" Desmond said firmly and a little louder than necessary.

"Like name ideas?" Rebecca offered.

He threw the pile of empty hot sauce packets at her.

* * *

><p>August 3, 2013<p>

"Listen, kiddo!" Desmond said loudly, standing in the middle of his bedroom. "I got everything all set up for you out here!" He pointed toward each item in succession. "There's your crib, there's your changing table, there's your clothes, there's your diapers, there's your toys, and there's formula and baby food in the mess hall! We're all prepped! So you can stop procrastinating, buster, and start the labor right now! I'm ready for it!"

There was no response. Of course.

Desmond leaned against the changing table, resting his elbows on the pad atop it, and sighed. "Look, I know I wasn't very nice to you at first, but that was a long time ago. I thought you were Juno or something crazy like that." He chuckled. "Well, I mean, this is still crazy, I'm still a dude pregnant by another dude and an evil ghost bitch, but whatever. What I'm trying to say is: I promise I'll be a nice dad when you finally get your ass out here. So hurry up, kiddo."

He thought he felt something shifting inside him after that speech. But then again, maybe it was just gas.

* * *

><p>August 4, 2013<p>

"What about Carlo?"

Desmond was helping Rebecca wash dishes, and she was dead set on getting a name picked out. There was no deterring her this time, so he'd finally relented. "I've considered it. Doesn't seem to go right with my last name, though."

"Carlo Miles," she said, testing the combination. "It does sound a little off, I guess."

"Not sure I'd want to reuse the name of **anyone** from the Animus, actually," he admitted. "Seems weird somehow. Like, I'd probably constantly compare kiddo to whatever ancestor he's named for, and that doesn't seem like it'd be a recipe for a good childhood."

"Okay, let's just go down the alphabet, then."

"As long as we skip M. I told you already, no way I'm using 'Mark Miles' or 'Michael Miles' or whatever."

"Yeah, I remember. So, how does 'Alex' sound?"

"I knew an Alex in New York. Regular customer. He was an asshole. Always shoving people out of his way so he could get his drink first."

"What about... Brent?"

Desmond blew a raspberry to indicate his opinion on that one.

"Calvin?"

He made a face and there was a clattering splash as he dropped the plate he'd been rinsing back into the sink.

"Aw, come on, Calvin is a cool name. Like _Calvin and Hobbes_, y'know? Although I'd hope your kid wouldn't be as much of a hellraiser as the comics kid."

"Not that. Urgh." Desmond laid a hand on his shirt, the uterus inside hard to the touch beneath the soft cotton. "Contraction."

"Oh." Rebecca quirked an eyebrow. "Real or practice?"

"Fuck if I can tell..." he groaned, shaking his head. "Hope it's real, though."

"Take a seat in your favorite chair, then," she advised him, "and we'll wait a bit and see. You better not be faking it to get out of washing dishes."

He sank into the indicated chair and stared at his watch as the tightness ebbed away.

Three minutes.

Five minutes.

Ten minutes. Rebecca finished the dishes. "Anything?"

"Nothing."

"Geez."

"God damn. I'm gonna be preggers forever," Desmond scowled down at his unfamiliar body, so distorted from the way it used to be, and addressed his son. "Don't you wanna get out of there just as much as I want you out? You gotta be running out of room!"

"I don't think Junior has any say in when it happens. Maybe it just takes a little longer for a baby to develop in a man," Rebecca hypothesized. "Because of dudely hormones or whatever."

"Hey, I've got tons of girly hormones mixed in with my dudely ones," Desmond countered, then offered an alternative explanation. "You said male pregnancy was a punishment. Maybe Juno's just torturing me. Maybe he'll really never be born, and I'm doomed to slowly die as he grows larger and larger until I fucking explode!"

"Hey, stop that," Rebecca interjected. "I've read a little bit of that pregnancy book. It said it's normal at the end of the pregnancy to feel like your baby won't ever come."

Desmond waved his hands in a sarcastic mockery of happiness. "Oh, goodie, I'm **normal**."

"Besides, how would it be 'slowly dying' if you explode?"

This earned her an intense scowl.

She held up her hands in apology. "Sorry... Maybe having sex again would kick things into action? You wanna try?"

"Ah, geez, I hardly believe I'm saying this, but I'm not up for sex right now," he sighed.

"Suit yourself."

As Rebecca left to go do whatever she did these days, Desmond picked up the book he'd left on the table and resumed reading. He was just losing himself again in the weird exploits of Sylvie and Bruno when his back started to ache. He adjusted his posture, attempting to relieve the discomfort, but it only intensified and then his front was aching as well as his back and _holy shit this isn't a backache this is another contraction!_

He dropped the Carroll compilation and pushed himself out of the chair. "Uhh Rebecca? Or somebody?"

"Whaaat?" came Rebecca's voice from several rooms down the hall.

"I think it might be real this time!"

* * *

><p>"It better be real this time," Stacey threatened when they got to the infirmary. "If it doesn't happen in the next day or two I'm just going to throw caution to the wind and induce you. Okay, you know the drill: get on the cot and I'll start the stopwatch."<p>

So Desmond waited. He was starting to feel hot so he took off his shirt. Rebecca and Stacey made idle conversation about the weather. An ineffable interval passed... and then he cried out excitedly: "Aha! There it goes again! Ha-ha! See, I told you!"

Now that his shirt was gone, he could see it as well as feel it: a tensioning of the muscles, as if he was trying in vain to suck in his gut. Except this was happening on its own, with no input from Desmond.

"Absolutely **wild**," Rebecca said, fascinated by the sight.

"Ohhh, man." There was a slight note of anxiety in his voice. "This is really happening." More than slight, actually.

"You need a painkiller?" Stacey offered.

"I can handle it," he replied, not wanting to appear weak. He kept the addendum _For now at least_ unspoken.

"Should I go tell everyone it's finally underway?" Rebecca asked.

"Um... I guess." Desmond felt embarrassed, though he knew that feeling made no rational sense. She dashed off. He tried to read his book.

Tried not to think about the mysterious process his body was undergoing.

Tried not to think about how it would get more and more painful from this point on.

Tried not to think about being responsible for the well-being of a helpless infant.

Tried not to think about having to propel said infant through his mutated crotch.

Tried not to think about the implications of it having been germinated from the DNA of Clay Kaczmarek.

He tried, but failed miserably. It was actually a relief when the next contraction started, offering a focal point to distract him from those troubling contemplations. "Urrgh." He squeezed the edge of the mattress.

"Don't tense up. That'll make it worse."

Desmond relaxed his grip a tiny fraction. "How long is this gonna take?" He'd read something or other about labor timeframes but couldn't recall it in his present state of mind.

Stacey thought she could detect an "ow" cleverly masked behind that "how", but she didn't let on. "Several hours, at least."

"Like three hours?" he asked in vain hope.

"Three would be a miracle. Could be eight, ten, twelve, fifteen, eighteen... From what I've read, it'll most likely be on the longer side, since this is your first."

He wrinkled his nose. "Urgh. Don't say it like that."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't say it's my first, that makes it sound like I'll be having a second one someday!"

She restrained herself from rolling her eyes at this. "'First' just means there weren't any before it."

"No, 'first' implies there's at least one more after it!" he insisted. "Like First Civilization! Humans obviously came after, or else they'd just be called **the** Civilization!"

"Son?" came a voice from the doorway.

"Lemme guess, 'are you alright?' Yeah, I'm just peachy." He waved an irritated hand at Stacey. "She's just trying to get in my head and subconsciously make me wanna get knocked up again."

Now she **did** roll her eyes. "Don't be ridiculous. You might not even be able to, you might not even have ovaries."

"I wish I didn't, but where'd all the stupid hormones come from then?"

"They come from the placenta obviously, that's why they're indicators of pregnancy."

Their debate was delayed by a forced cough from William. "Dinner's in about fifteen minutes. If you need me before then, I'll be in my office."

After he had gone, Desmond turned to Stacey and wondered, "What exactly does he think we'll need him for?"

She shrugged.

"Anyway! Ovaries or no, it doesn't matter," he said firmly, crossing his arms. "I'm sure as hell not letting any sperms inside me."

"You already have sperm inside you," Rebecca pointed out as she returned from her mission of letting everyone know that labor had commenced for real this time. "In your balls."

"Shut up, you know what I meant."

The clock ticked loudly for another minute before the medic, sensing her patient had calmed down from the whole "first" debacle, said, "Let's check how far you've dilated, okay?"

"No, not okay!" He crossed his legs tightly, as if he thought Stacey was about to reach straight through his shorts and underwear.

"Well, I guess I can delay that for a while. But I do need to check eventually, because I need to know if your labor isn't progressing, because that could get problematic."

"Problematic like how?" he asked, unintentionally reminding himself of that day he'd asked about his lab results, "Weird like how?"

Stacey seemed about to answer, then shook her head slightly and said, "We'll cross that bridge if it comes up. Hopefully it won't. Have you got a name yet?"

"**I've** got a name: it's Desmond," he said, then poked the swelling. "**He** doesn't."

"Very funny."

The poking hand changed position gradually until it was resting gently on his extruded navel. Desmond looked intently down at his hand for several seconds, as if he himself didn't know why it had moved. Then he spoke. "I, uh... I did decide on a middle name, though."

The two women waited in expectant silence.

Desmond cleared his throat quietly. "Clayton."

"I see what you did there," Rebecca smirked. "Now you just need the first name. Let's pick back up the alphabet from where we left off, shall we? How about ...Darren?"

He thought a moment. "Darren's not bad. I'll keep it in mind."

"Emilio?"

"Pass."

"Francis?"

"Maybe. Another one's starting," Desmond said conversationally. "Oh hi there Spence."

"How you holding up, man?" Spencer asked from the doorway, trying not to sound overly concerned.

Desmond shrugged. "Not bad. What's on the menu for dinner?"

Spencer's eyes drifted around the room, looking everywhere except at the man he was talking to. "Uh, I think Colin's making a quiche or something. Are you even gonna be able to join us in the mess hall? I hear you kinda got something else going on right now."

"He needs to eat," Rebecca said. "He'll need all the energy he can get for this, right, Stace?"

"Yes, I'd say it's okay to go have dinner as normal. His contractions are still pretty far apart."

"And they barely even hurt," Desmond added, a little smugly.

* * *

><p>Dinner was a bit awkward. People made clumsy attempts at conversation, trying to dance around the laboring elephant in the room.<p>

"You guys don't have to act like this isn't happening," Desmond finally said. "I know- auuuh." He emitted a strangely out-of-character breathy moan and they all turned to look at him with concern. He blushed a tiny bit, not liking being ignored, but not liking being the center of worried attention either. "Don't overreact! I'm fine! It's just... agh..." He set down the forkful of quiche he'd just picked up. "Aahhh. Man."

"Hey, Shaun didn't like even talking about birth at the table," Rebecca said, grinning. "Imagine his reaction if he knew you were **having contractions **at the table!"

"How's the pain, Desmond?" Stacey asked. "Scale of one to ten?"

"I dunno... two, maybe three? It's not too bad." He inhaled sharply. "Just kinda distracting. Can we, urgh, talk about something else? Get my mind off of it? How's that Snowden thing going along?"

William answered. "He's still in Russia. Our people there are going to evaluate him and send me their findings."

"Oh? Then what?" Desmond asked, the contraction beginning to fade now.

"Then I'm to formally decide whether they can proceed to initiate him. I'll most likely say yes, though obviously I can't make a final judgement until I read over their report."

Spencer raised an eyebrow. "You sure that's wise?"

"Are you saying he's not a good fit for the Brotherhood? He's clearly brave enough to stand for what's right, and intelligent enough to know how to do it. He even left a high-paying job and broke ties with his girlfriend and family in order to make it happen."

"Yeah, but look at the big picture, Bill. Eddie's a media darling and everyone wants to know all about him. Where he is, what he's doing there, why he's doing it. We're already sheltering the guy. If he actually joins, there's even more of a chance that some intrepid reporter could uncover his connection to us! It would be on front pages everywhere!" Spencer spread his palms outward in the air, framing imagined newspaper headlines. 'The Assassins: Snowden's Secret Society Revealed!' 'Everything Is Permitted, Claims Terrorist Group!'"

William shrugged off this concern. "It's a risk we take with every new member, that someone on the outside might discover what they've gotten into."

"No, not **every** new member. Not **this** new member, for examp." Colin abbreviated the last word and gestured playfully at the belly of Desmond, who frowned slightly, wondering how his son would handle being born into a secret society fighting an ancient and unending war.

_"You are an Assassin," they always told me. I didn't even know what that really meant for most of my life. I had to run away and get kidnapped before I believed._ A sudden terror struck at his heart. _What if he runs away like I did?_ He resolved then and there to explain things to his son a lot more clearly than William had ever done; to show him concrete proof of Templar malice, not just talk of vague threats that might come to pass. To be honest with him, even if the truth was scary.


	32. Insane

After dinner, Desmond decided to take a shower. While scrubbing the vast expanse of his abdomen, it occurred to him that the next time he showered, it would finally be flat again. _Well, not completely flat_, he admitted to himself. _Most likely I'm gonna have to work off a few extra pregnancy pounds. I hope-_ "Ooh!" The acoustics of the small bathroom made his cry sound louder than it actually was. He braced himself against the tile wall as another pain started, but couldn't manage to stay standing and slowly slid to a seated position. _I was pretty much done showering anyway. Can't waste water._ He turned off the faucet and shivered through the remainder of the contraction, then dried off and redressed himself. _Hell, even with a few extra pounds, I'll still be able to go back to normal clothes!_ he mentally rejoiced while struggling with the zipper on his largest pair of shorts. He eventually gave up on it and had to leave the fly halfway between up and down.

William was waiting with concern outside the bathroom when Desmond opened the door. "Are you all right? I heard-"

"Heard me having a contraction, yeah. Get used to it, there's gonna be a lot of them."

"Come on, let's get you back to Ms. Russ." He put an arm around his son's shoulders and they walked together down the hall.

"Dad? Do you think... Is there any way she could go to med school while still being an Assassin? So she can be an actual doctor?"

William quirked his mouth into a semi-smile. "She's qualified enough. You'll be fine."

Desmond shook his head. "I'm not worried about that. It's just, she said she wanted to be a docterrrh!" His jaw clenched and the last syllable became elongated.

They came to a halt. His father looked apprehensive. "Is it bad?"

"Not very," Desmond grunted, forcing himself to continue walking despite the knotting in his stomach. "Not yet."

"I, ah... I hope you don't have too much trouble. Your mother... She told me your birth was quite... intense. And lengthy."

"Yeah, I saw the note in my file. Twenty hours."

William nodded.

"And it's been, like, not even **two** hours for me yet." He changed the subject, not wanting to contemplate the possible length of time this would take. "Hey, Dad..."

"Yes?"

"I just realized. You're the only one who hasn't been bugging me about kiddo's name. I mean, apart from asking me what Ezio's son was named."

Another nod. "Well, of course. You've made it abundantly clear that you want to choose his name yourself. And there's no rush."

"No rush?" Desmond chuckled. "I'm in labor right now, Dad. Right. Now."

"We're a family of born Assassins, Desmond. Myself, yourself, and him." William gestured to himself, then to Desmond, then to the unborn-but-not-for-much-longer child. "Born into secrecy. Born into hiding. Which means we're not filling out a birth certificate for him, just like we didn't for you and my parents didn't for me. Which means you can take your time with his name."

Desmond smiled. "Heh. You got a point there."

* * *

><p>"A Polish name, mebbe," Rebecca thought out loud. "Since it's Kaczmarek's."<p>

"Oh come on!" Desmond nearly shouted. "I don't want to be constantly reminded of that guy! I'm already dedicating the middle name to him! Plus you've seen what Polish names are like! I want kiddo to be able to spell and pronounce the damn thing!"

For a while, William had dutifully stayed by Desmond's side in the infirmary as the hours ticked by, sacrificing a hand to be squeezed during contractions, making semi-awkward small talk between them. But, about ninety minutes ago, the usually-unshakable Mentor had fled to his office, having finally become too unsettled by what was happening to his son.

Really, Desmond was glad his father wasn't there now. He didn't like having so many people fussing over him. He kept trying to get Rebecca to leave, but she kept coming back, kept prodding him with more baby name suggestions, which irritated him to no end, as he was currently a lot more concerned about getting the kid out than getting him named. Rebecca also insisted on rubbing his back during contractions. He was loath to admit it, but it actually felt kind of nice, especially now that they kept getting stronger and more frequent. _Well, derrr, of course they're getting stronger and more frequent, that's kinda how this shit works, remember?_

He now saw another powerful cramp radiating across the huge mound of flesh, tightening the whole thing into a compact sphere, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing so forcefully, _how can it physically do that without just **popping**?_

Just as he thought that, something actually **did** pop. He yelped, startling Rebecca and Stacey. One of them was asking him something but he didn't hear it. His attention was focused on the bizarre trickling flowing wetness he felt coming from inside. He knew what this meant and he scrambled as best he could off the cot, stumbling into the infirmary's bathroom, yanking off shorts and boxers in one clumsy motion. Then he sat himself down on the toilet, head in hands. There was an impossibly loud dripping sound.

"Desmond?" Rebecca called through the locked door.

"My fucking water broke."

"Okay, that's good," Stacey said. "Can you let me in?"

"My fucking water broke," he repeated, not moving.

"Okay, I heard you. I want to check your dilation."

"I'm a man whose water broke, a man that's having contractions and dilating and shit, **I'm a man having a baby**! A **computer program's** baby! This is fucking **insane**!" He'd been pretty calm about it up to this point, but this latest development was an abrupt reminder of how abnormal the situation was.

"Okay, it's insane. But that doesn't change the fact that it's happening. Come on, open up."

"I'm kind of naked in here!"

"Nothing I haven't seen before."

He groaned loudly, demanded that she "Gimme a minute!" and waited until the cramp ebbed away, until the ungodly flow seemed to have ceased, then opened the door, but not before wrapping a towel round his bits.

"Okay, Desmond, I'll need you to lie down or stand with your legs apart or something."

"Uggh. Have I mentioned that I hate it when you reach up in there?"

"Numerous times."

Again he endured the foreign sensations of fingers in an orifice that was never meant to exist. The fingers brushed against something. "Feels like... four centimeters."

"Only **four**? Fuck. Can I have those painkillers now?"

"I was wondering when you'd ask. How bad is it?"

"Pretty bad, though I guess it could be worse."

"Come on, then." She wrapped him in his robe for privacy and they returned from the bathroom. Then she gave him two largish tablets which he swallowed eagerly. "These should kick in in about half an hour, okay? I'd give you something stronger, intravenously, but I'm afraid that would hamper your ability to push and/or adversely affect the baby."

"So you're saying it's still gonna hurt even with the pills." Desmond was disconsolate at this news.

"Sorry, but yes. You should try walking around a bit, that should move things along faster."

He nodded eagerly. "Faster is good. I like faster. Let's shift this labor into high profile mode."

Stacey tilted her head a few degrees to the left. "What?"

"You know, like in the-" Desmond stopped. "Oh, never mind." He rubbed his stomach idly. "It's not funny if I have to explain it."

She shrugged. "Right. Go walk a bit, eat a snack, whatever you like. Just, come straight back here if there's any problem, okay?"

"Yeah, yeah."

Walking aimlessly down the hall, he spotted his father, who froze at the sight of him. There was an uneasy silence for too many seconds until William eventually settled on a greeting: "Good evening?" There was an odd questioning intonation at the end, perhaps because the time was already well past evening.

"Mm," the laboring man answered, lacking anything better to say himself.

Colin rounded the corner. "Yo there Miles Senior, Miles Junior. What's the status on Miles The Third?"

"The, uh... water broke," Desmond reported, feeling self-conscious. "And... it's four outta ten centimeters." He was purposefully avoiding first-person pronouns, linguistically treating the birth as a process unaffiliated with himself. "Starting to hurt a lot."

"...Well, you know what Ruskin says? 'Labor without sorrow is base.'"

Desmond gave him a questioning look. "Colin, has anyone ever told you your conversational skills-" His speech halted as he recognized the now-familiar yet still loathsome symptoms of an approaching contraction, viz.: deep muscles tightening up, increased awareness of how goddamn **full** his abdomen was, and a sudden rush of heat all through his body. He leaned forward against the wall, and found himself unable to repress pained vocalizations. "Urrrh... auuuugh. Fffffuck."

William was even more discomfited now. "Ah... do you need anything?" he offered hesitantly.

"Just need- agh... need this to be done with... soon."

"How much longer will it be?"

Desmond made an exaggerated shrug.

"You don't know. Right. Of course." William ran a hand through his hair, at a loss for what to do. For once, his decades of life experience were of no use. He'd looked after many children of varying ages on the Farm, but child**birth** was a completely new one on him. _Russ better be up to the task._

"What's that about my conversational skills?"

The reply came after another low groan. "They... could use some serious work." Desmond pushed himself off the wall so he was in a standing position again. "I do need something. I need coffee. I need the fuck out of some coffee."

Colin smirked. "So, you're still cravin' stuff, after all this time, when you're almost not pregnant anymore."

"It's not a **craving**, it's just that it's the middle of the fucking night and I'm tired!"

"Come on," William said, daring to put an arm around his son. "I'll put a pot on."

* * *

><p>"Feeling better?" William asked Desmond once he'd consumed two large mugs of coffee.<p>

"Umm... a little... Ah, shit!" His body contorted with pain and he gripped the mug handle tightly. "Contrrr... grrr... owwww."

William warily patted Desmond's shoulder, hoping to comfort him. "It's all right, son."

"Noooo..." Desmond half-sobbed as he rested his head on the table. "It's not! I..." He looked up, fear painted across his face. "I don't think I can do this!"

"Don't give me that."

"But, uughhh... hurts...so much!"

"Listen to me, Desmond." William punctuated his speech with a pointed finger. "You're strong. You've proven that many times since you rejoined us. You **can** do this."

"But I'm a man!" was the doleful reply, after more sounds of pain.

"Yes, you are. What's your point?"

He would have said "Derrr!" if he wasn't in such a state of emotional weakness. "Men aren't supposed to have babies! What if Juno's tryna kill me?"

"If she wanted you dead, she would have killed you outright after killing Lucy," he answered bluntly. "She had complete control of your body; she could have stopped your heart or made you slice open your arteries. But she didn't. She altered your body so you have all the necessary parts to bear a child. We don't know why, and we may **never** know why, but the fact remains that you have those necessary parts. You'll be fine." He ended his pep talk, such as it was, by reiterating, "You're strong, physically and mentally. You **can** do this, Desmond."


	33. Spingere

August 5, 2013

The thoroughly exhausted Desmond tried to sleep between contractions, but it was a futile effort. His heavy eyelids closed as soon as he hit the pillow, but there was never more than a few minutes of respite before the tightness returned with a vengeance. Rebecca hovered around his bedroom anxiously, attempting to soothe him.

"He's putting me through hell!" Desmond howled after a particularly agonizing bout. "I thought it was painful when that damn **hole** opened up in me, but this is a majillion times worse! I swear I am **never** having any more kids!"

"**You** wouldn't be having them," Rebecca pointed out. "Not unless you hook up with a guy and-"

"Fuck off!" He swung one arm violently through the air at her, and she had to jump back to avoid being hit. "I mean I'm never gonna make anyone I love suffer through this! That fucking thing in the Temple that burned the shit outta my arm was nothing compared to this! At least that had the decency to be over with quickly!"

"If it's hurting that bad, then I think it's time to go back to Stace. Unless..." She blinked a couple of times. "Is Junior coming **right this minute**? Are you about to shit him out right on the bed here?"

"The only thing I need to shit out right now is shit." He managed to stand up. "I'll swing by the crapper and meet you back at the infirmary."

* * *

><p>"There you are!" said an exasperated Stacey upon seeing her patient return. "I was just about to go looking for you. How close are the contractions?"<p>

"Three minutes or thereabouts," Rebecca said, helping him up onto the cot.

"Christ on a cracker!" he yelped. Stacey clicked her stopwatch as Desmond fell back onto the cot, his entire body spasming. Not only were they closer together and incredibly strong, but they were each lasting an eternity. Excruciating tightness, unbearable fullness, throbbing heat.

Gloved fingers reached between his legs once the contraction was over. "Oh my. I think you're fully dilated, Desmond. Get ready to push on the next one, okay?"

"Holy shit, dude!" Rebecca exclaimed, looking way too excited. "You're gonna meet your mystery kid real soon now!"

"You wouldn't be so happy about this if it was happening to **you**!" Desmond snarled up at her. "And just **what** am I supposed to do to 'get ready'? Like, do jumping jacks to warm up?! Oh, fuck, 'three minutes' my ass, here's another one already!" Another immense contraction squoze his middle. He felt light headed and his vision was swimming, the white walls of the infirmary seeming to warp and change color. He closed his eyes tightly against the maelstrom.

"I need you to push now, Desmond."

"No..."

"He won't come out unless you push!"

"Parassito fottuto!" he spat. "Se questo ragazzo è Clay, lo ammazzo!"

"Shit, just what we need right now, a Bleeding Effect! Fucking great timing!" Rebecca got right up in his face. "Focus, Desmond. Focus and push!"

"Non voglio questoooo!" he wailed, tears welling from his eyes as he looked into hers.

"Listen to me, Desmond! You want this to be over with, right?" He nodded weakly. "Then you have to push him out of you!"

Desmond felt another contraction start. When had the previous one ended? He didn't even know. But now there was another, and it seemed to come out of nowhere to fill his entire being with what had to be that instinctual "urge" he'd read about, and he could no longer fight it, and he **pushed**.

It felt so unnatural, so wrong. He was scared he was somehow not doing it right and would hurt himself; he almost stopped. But at the edge of his awareness, beyond the tightness and the fullness and the heat, he heard Rebecca and Stacey saying encouraging words and so he kept on and kept on, the muscles of his abdominal wall working in tandem with those of his uterus. His mind was in such a fog that he didn't even realize that he'd just thought of it as **his **uterus.

And then another feeling started, this one in that mysterious area located between bladder and rectum. The child was moving out of the uterus, into the birth canal. It was almost beyond his comprehension.

When the contraction ended Desmond moaned, letting out the breath he didn't realize he'd been holding.

"Aghh... Those painkillers aren't doing jack for me anymore. I'm not even sure they were helping that much in the first place."

"Well, at least you're speaking English again now. That's good."

"I wasn't before? Shit."

Stacey patted his hand reassuringly. "Don't worry about that right now, okay? Right now we're focusing on getting this baby out. I bet your pushes would be more effective and less painful if you let gravity help a little." They worked together to shift him upright, scooting him down the cot until he was seated on the edge. Rebecca sat behind him with more backrubs, while Stacey held up the bottom of his robe, focusing her attention on what was happening down below.

"So, uh... what **was** I speaking? More Polish?"

"Italian," Rebecca answered.

He blinked. "Italian. Woah, that takes me back... What did I say?"

"Something like, 'If this parasite is Clay I'll kill him', and then 'I don't want this.'"

"Heh, sounds about right... Oh god," Desmond moaned, feeling the next cramp start and quickly ramp up to a murderously painful level. Now he was bearing down again. It wasn't even voluntary this time. His body was once again not under his control, the muscles were flexing on their own, moving his baby- _holy shit I am actually having a baby holy shit_- down, ever so slowly and ever so painfully- _damn this is like the worst constipation ever!_- infinitesimally closer to the exit. "Fucking fuuuuck!"

"Go ahead, yell and cuss as loud as you need to," Rebecca said from behind him. "Whatever helps you get through this, man. We're out in the middle of nowhere, don't need to worry about stealth."

"Forget about stealth! I'm fucking dying here!" he managed to retort as the peak of the pang abated.

"You're not dying, okay? Nobody's dying. Quite the opposite, in fact," Stacey reminded him.

"Yeah, you're making a new life!"

"Don't you start in on that sappy shit again! He's already alive in there, dumbass! Aaaargh!" He yelled anew as another pain compressed him.

Stacey saw his abdomen tensing up. "Okay, there's a contraction, come on, push with it, push with it!"

He seized a white-knuckled hold of the cot and again engaged the foreign muscles inside him.

There was a knock on the door. "Ah, how we doing in there, son?"

The reply was a gruff and guttural "Hggggh!"

Rebecca answered in his stead. "Sorry, Bill, he can't talk right now, he's pushing."

William said something back to her through the door, something inaudible to Desmond, whose ears had just begun to fill with his own pounding heartbeat as he toiled against the blockage inside him, for right now he wasn't able to conceive of the "blockage" as a living thing, right now it was just something causing him tremendous anguish.

After the anguish had died down, he slumped forward, hands on Stacey's shoulders. "God **damn** this labor thing is hard." He rested a few moments, then added "Especially this pushing part."

Rebecca laughed, a short throaty chuckle. "Did ya think it'd be easy?"

"No, but I oh shit!" Another contraction was upon him already, and he started pushing again, hoping fervently that he wouldn't have to do this much longer.

"Don't strain yourself, okay?" Stacey offered a suggestion. "Try pushing more gently but for a longer time." However, Desmond didn't have enough practice using these muscles to be able to comply, but just continued in his current fashion. The obstruction inched down in response, but then something happened that made him stop pushing altogether.

Labor wasn't the only thing that was hard now.

_Dammit, out of all the times in the world to get a random boner!_ He tried to hide it from Stacey but she was right there, looking right at it. Her eyes widened and then jumped up to meet his. "It's okay," she said softly.

Desmond let out a pitiful whimper of pained embarrassment.

"I should have figured this might happen. I should have told you ahead of time."

"What's going on?" Rebecca asked, the source of Desmond's distress mercifully not visible from her viewpoint.

"Nunna yer bizness!" he snapped.

"Rebecca, could you bring me a basin of warm water?" Stacey requested, businesslike. "And some cloths, the sterile ones, okay?"

Once Rebecca had gone out of earshot, the medic scooted her stool up, spoke in Desmond's ear.

"I think the baby's head is pressing against your prostate."

_Prostate, prostate, what is that, where have I heard that before, holy fucking fuck, the baby's head, the **baby's head**, there's a baby's head coming outta my taint and I got a boner from it somehow, what the hell is wrong with me?!_

"It's an autonomic response, okay? Don't feel ashamed. This might actually help lessen the pain."

Now that she mentioned it, he realized that the pain, the almost unbearable pain, had seemed to become a smidge less all-consuming.

"Do you want to go, um, take a minute? In the restroom?"

He realized what she was saying, considered for a few moments, then nodded once, unaware of the blush that had appeared across his face.

Desmond waddled unsteadily to the bathroom. _Hell, I'm really about to jack off in the middle of giving birth. My life is so **fucked**._ He double-, triple-, quadruple-checked that the door was locked before shrugging off the sweaty robe, settling on the toilet and reaching slowly for his throbbing shaft.

The situation was incredibly unsexy, but release came so fast he was thrown completely off his guard. He shouted some unintelligible string of syllables. There was the familiar pleasure of orgasm, but at the same time there was the decidedly unfamiliar and unpleasant feeling of something moving inside him- _holy shit it's moving down and I'm not even pushing or nothing_- "Gaahhh!"

"What's happening? Is he all right?" came William's voice from outside the door.

"He's fine," was the medic's semi-calm answer.

"That didn't sound like 'fine' to me!"

"Well what do you expect, he's having a baby!" Rebecca retorted in exasperation. "I've heard it's kinda painful!"

He barely managed to wipe up the spattered evidence of his earlier arousal before another contraction hit and he yelled out again.

"Desmond?" Stacey knocked. "How close are you?"

_How close, close to what, oh of course, close to getting the damn thing out, derr._ "You... tell... me." Each word was a struggle as he rose on shaky legs to unlock the door. The medic slipped into the bathroom, careful not to open the door any wider than necessary, as Desmond collapsed onto all fours, trying his darnedest to "breathe through the pain" like that stupid book had said.

"Don't you need that water and stuff?"

"In a minute, Becca!" Stacey called. "Okay, Desmond, I'm going to check you again, once this contraction's over."

Then her fingers were inside him again, but they didn't go very deep this time.

"He's right there, okay? Just a couple inches in. You're very close to delivering."

"Oh thank God!" he spluttered. Then his limbs gave out and he had to shift to lie on his side. The coolness of the tile floor he felt through the rug was refreshing.

Stacey got a towel from a drawer, draped it over his legs to allow him some modicum of privacy, then raised her voice to address Rebecca. "Okay, bring the basin and cloths!"

Desmond gasped with relief as something warm and wet pressed between his legs, soothing the soreness.

"Right, I'm just making sure everything down here is all clean. How are you holding up?"

"Ehh..."

"Not much longer to go, okay, just remember that. Now, when you feel the next contraction, go on and give a nice steady push."

As if cued by her words, his stomach tightened up right then. He threw his head back, gritted his teeth, and exerted all the force he could muster. A random thought popped into his brain: _He'll have the memory of me, of this, of my whole life._ It was surreal to imagine the possibility that his descendant, and his further descendants, might relive his life someday. _Fine by me, just as long as Abstergo doesn't make it into a videogame and fucking profit off it!_

The contraction seemed to go on for ages before finally relenting.

"Good, good." Stacey patted his thigh reassuringly. "Really good pushes, Desmond."

"Ugh. Thanks. Glad you like them, because I sure don't," he quipped.

"I mean you're pushing very effectively. You're moving him down really well with each one. Do you want to feel?"

"Feel what?"

"His head."

"I feel it just fine right now thanks!" he snapped.

"You're in the home stretch, okay? Keep up the good work."

Then another wave of instinct hit him, telling him to _get it out get it out get it out now now now_ and he struggled and strained, and he felt a different sensation added to the mix, a stretching burning ripping sensation dulled only somewhat by the cloth Stacey was applying to his tortured flesh. Then she removed the cloth and said he was doing well, he was starting to crown. Desmond wanted to tell her to put it back, that he needed the water to neutralize the fire, but he couldn't talk, the contraction was still using every ounce of energy his body possessed.

The instant he was able to speak again, he requested she reapply the damp cloth, but she shook her head. "He's just about ready to come out, I don't want to block the way."

"Ugh! But the burning! I need something!" His eyes alighted on the bathtub, and he remembered there had been something about "water birth" in _Pregnancy 101_. When he'd read it, he'd dismissed the idea as nonsense, but now... He swept a hand out to indicate the tub. "Can you fill that and let me get in there?"

"Yes, of course!" Stacey rushed to begin filling the tub, knowing they didn't have much time before the next contraction, and then helped him in.

"Ohhh, that's better," Desmond sighed. He was still in agony, but it was slightly more bearable now. The painful stretching feeling remained, but the burning and friction were lessened by the water. "Can I just stay here until everything's over?"

"Whatever makes you comfortable."

He shot her an irritated look. "This is a long way off from 'comfortable'. I haven't been 'comfortable' in months."

Stacey made a small nervous laugh acknowledging this and then reached to turn off the faucet. Desmond caught sight of her wristwatch. It was some ungodly hour of the morning. When had labor started? Four PM? Five? He suddenly felt extremely tired. _Would have been nice if he'd have waited 'till I had a good night's sleep before deciding to be born._ He couldn't lean back, so he leaned forward and laid his head on folded arms, eyes closed, trying to rest.

All too soon, he was desynchronized from his nap attempt by another powerful, involuntary wrenching. It built up and built up, magnifying over a span of time that seemed far too long, and he swore loudly and creatively as he felt something huge begin to slowly emerge. Then it stopped and slipped backwards a bit. "Son of a cunting bitch! Don't go back **in**! Goddamnit!" he growled.

"Try to relax, okay?" Stacey said, rubbing his shoulder.

"How the fuck am I supposed to fucking relax right now!? It's ripping me apart and it hurts like a motherfucker! Like ten motherfuckers!"

"Come on, you can do this. Aren't you the guy who's been stabbed, shot, nearly hanged-"

"Animus shit! Don't compare this to that! Fucking apples to oraaaagghh!" Another wave of tightening struck him, turning the last word into a scream. The scream lasted fifteen seconds before his lungs were empty and he was forced to take a breath.

"There you go, breathe."

He realized that she was right, it **had** hurt less when he was breathing instead of screaming. For the remainder of the long contraction, he started to do that idiotic cliché Lamaze panting thing from every TV show and movie, and it worked surprisingly well. _Only hurts like half a motherfucker now._

This time, when the contraction was over, the baby's head did **not** go back in, and Desmond, slight tears in his eyes, half-wished it had, but the other half of him knew that this meant the whole ordeal was close to being over.

"And okay, he's crowned."

"Yeah, ow, ow, I can tell, ow. Haa, hee, haa, hee..." He tried to concentrate on the feeling of air moving in and out of his lungs, rather than the stinging pins-and-needles between his legs. _Hurry up, next motherfucking contraction, hurry up!_ he thought, gripping the edge of the tub like his life depended on it.

Stacey sponged away copious sweat from his face. Time seemed to slow to a crawl, but Desmond could tell that time hadn't actually stopped completely because he found his breathing matching up with the noisy ticking of the second hand on the medic's watch. "Haa, hee, haa, hee, haa..." _I'm so fucking glad Dad's not here seeing me like this. Hell, I'm barely okay with Stacey seeing me like this!_

"Haa, hee, haaaaaohggghh!" There came the next one, and Desmond's controlled breathing became erratic again. Without him being conscious of initiating the motion, his arms reached around the immense roundness and his hands sought out the opening. He grunted as he bore down, taking quick, short, almost hyperventilating breaths between grunts. He felt it now, with his fingers as well as the rest of him: a smattering of hair, the folds of an ear, a tiny nose. There was really a human body coming out of his own body. His mind couldn't even form a coherent thought.

Stacey's hands were there too now, gently holding shaft and scrotum out of the way. "Okay, head's out. You're almost done."

Rebecca's voice from somewhere called out excitedly, "He's almost done, Bill!"

Desmond didn't hear either of them, engrossed as he was with his current task. During the brief calm between contractions, there was yet another bizarre feeling in his groin as the baby turned to one side. He leaned forward a bit more, craning his neck, trying to see, but he couldn't. On reflection, he decided he didn't really want to see anyway.

The blinding pain had mercifully metamorphosed into just an overwhelming pressure now. When another cramp came on, he concentrated, putting all his effort into pushing with it. He felt the passage of one shoulder... then the other... then a sudden decrease in pressure and an infinitely satisfying relief.

A shrill wail echoed off the tiled surfaces of the bathroom. Someone outside the door began to applaud.

* * *

><p>There will be two more chapters of <em>Kryptokos<em>.

The in-progress sequel, titled _Because of You_, is already 14076 words long.


	34. Meeting

"Time of birth: oh-four-forty," Stacey said as she laid the impossibly tiny boy on his chest. Desmond panted heavily and stared at the thing, the child, the **person**: the flailing limbs, the tightly closed eyes, the wide open mouth, the waxy substance in the folds of the ruddy skin, the scattered droplets of blood, the wet brown hair atop the oddly shaped head.

Stacey couldn't help but smile at the intense way he was examining the baby. "Pretty incredible, huh? How do you feel?" she asked him, raising her voice to be heard over the warbling cries.

Right now Desmond felt a lot of things, none of which he could express verbally. He was still trying to catch his breath, to recover from the exertion, and used that time to consider his response, to snatch words from the swirling vortex of thoughts within his head: _this is my kid, this was inside me, **he** was inside me, this is who was kicking me all those times, and now he's here in my arms, I'm actually holding him, I'm holding a baby, I actually had a baby, he was finally born, I finally had him, it really happened, holy shit, this really happened, it's a real baby, how do I feel about my baby, holy shit, I really had a baby, I really just gave birth, even though I'm a man I still got pregnant and had a baby, holy shit, I have a baby_ and so on.

"I feel... really glad that he's finally out," he said at last. "...He doesn't seem too happy about it though." The boy was still crying. Desmond recalled a sentence from centuries past. _"He's got a fine set of lungs."_

"He's just confused and scared and cold." The medic took another of those warm wet cloths and began to clean and dry the wriggling newborn, still held securely in his father's arms.

_Yes, he's scared because he was used to being inside me up 'till now, and now he's outside me, he's finally out, I'm finally not pregnant anymore, after all these months I'm finally not pregnant anymore_ "Uh. Why am I still fat?"

"Uterus takes some time to shrink back to its pre-pregnancy size."

"Which is?"

"About like this." She held up a fist. "Name?"

"Umm..." Whereas before he hadn't been able to think of a single good one, now there were numerous possibilities all jostling about in his mind. _Nolan? Darren? Damien? Steven? Randall? Jonas? Andrew? Calvin? Jonathan? Travis? Tobias? Trevor?_ "...I'll have to get back to you on that."

Whatever his name was, he'd quieted down now, apparently calmed by the rubbing motions of Stacey's cleaning. She next brought a soft towel and wrapped the infant to keep him warm. Desmond's attention was drawn to the umbilical cord which snaked from under the edge of the towel, down into the water, back to... "Oh, there's still the whatd'yacallit. Thingy where this connects up to."

"Placenta."

"Yeah, that. That part won't hurt as much, right?"

She shook her head and bent down to inspect the birth canal, prodding gently and making "hmm" sounds. Desmond noticed the water was more than a little tinged with blood. "Um... Not like I'm ever planning to use that hole for anything after this, but, how are things down there?" he asked with a note of worry.

"There's a bit of tearing, but nothing too major, I'd say," she judged. "We probably have a little while before the placenta comes. Do you want to get out of the tub?"

"Ah, yeah." He carefully handed his son- _My son, god, I have a son, oh man, oh Christ_- over to the medic and stood up unsteadily. He dried himself off as best he could, still completely weirded out by the sight of the blobby twisted rope of tissue that disappeared into his own crotch. _What has been seen cannot be unseen._

"Knock knock!" Rebecca said, rather unnecessarily, since she was also actually knocking. "I heard a baby! What's your status? Can I come in?"

"Hold your horses, I'm still butt-ass naked in here." Desmond slipped on his robe. "All right. You can come in now, if you insist." Rebecca fairly flew into the bathroom before he'd even finished the sentence.

"Oh my god isn't he adorable!" she gushed.

"Is he? Lemme take another look." Stacey handed the boy back to him. "I guess he is, if you dig the squished conehead look."

"Come on, cut him a break, you'd look like that too if you just got crammed through a mangina!"

Desmond shut his eyes and sat down on the toilet. "Ah, I feel like I should hate that word you just used, but somehow, it's actually not bothering me." When he opened his eyes again, he saw his father standing in the doorway, looking anxious. "Uh, hi Dad. How long have you been out there?"

"A while actually," Rebecca answered, tickling the newborn under his chin. "He showed up shortly after you stopped speaking Italian."

"He's **still** having Bleeding Effects?!" William said, upset.

"I wouldn't worry too much, Mr. Miles," Stacey assured him. "It was very brief, probably brought about by the sheer stress of childbirth. You haven't had any others, have you, Desmond?"

"Not since forever ago," he confirmed, leaning his head forward to reinspect the child, who was looking back up at him just as intently. "Man... after all of that, he's actually finally here."

"Oh, lookit that, you're still connected." Rebecca fingered the umbilical cord.

"You don't have to tell me, Captain Obvious."

Stacey leant over Desmond with a stethoscope and said, "Let me check his heart rate." She then listened to the baby's chest for a minute and nodded. "Good heart rate, good muscle response, good skin tone, he cries well... For someone who was conceived and gestated in such an abnormal way, he seems pretty normal."

"What, you thought he might be all deformed or something?"

"Well, both his parents had Y chromosomes, one of them was not even a physical person anymore, and the other spent most of the first trimester handling First Civilization artifacts." She shrugged. "Any one of those could have affected him."

"And don't forget all those crazy missions, either!" Rebecca added. "Four out of five doctors don't recommend parachuting off a freakin' skyscraper while pregnant!"

"But he turned out fine," Desmond said, shifting the baby to one arm and massaging his aching stomach with the other hand.

"Looks like it," Stacey nodded, "But keep in mind he could still have something going on that's not immediately apparent."

_Apparent. A parent... Damn. I can't believe I'm a **parent**._ He almost felt like laughing at the ridiculousness of it.

"What about Desmond himself?" William asked.

"I'm feeling all right. Just tired. And hella sore. And kinda freaked out by this little guy." Desmond gingerly held his son's hand between two of his own fingers, stunned by the size difference. "Um. Hi there? Ow."

"Ow?" queried Rebecca.

"Agh... There's some, like, aftershock contractions... for the, ah... placenta." Thankfully, these were nowhere near the intensity of the previous ones. He shuddered as he felt a wet fleshy something slide slowly out of him and plop loudly into the toilet. "Ugh. There it goes. Gross."

* * *

><p>Ten minutes later he'd managed to get dressed again, and Stacey had severed the child from his cord.<p>

"I've decided what his name is," Desmond announced to the assembled group: Spencer, Rebecca and Stacey. Colin was on lookout duty and William had run off to his office for something or other.

"Hallelujah!" Spencer hooted. "Took you long enough. Let's hear it."

"Andrew. Andrew Clayton Miles." It still sounded a little weird to Desmond's ears; his own surname attached to this complete stranger. _He might not be a stranger_, he reminded himself, and then added, "Unless he tells us otherwise."

Before anyone could respond to this, William came rushing into the infirmary. "Miss Crane, I just got a message from John. You've got to get to Montreal **today**."

"Short notice much?"

"I **just now** got the message. He's having the intel delivered this afternoon and you need to be there to receive it."

"What's this about? Who's John?"

Rebecca opened her mouth to answer but William said, "I'll explain, you don't have time. Go now!"

She dutifully left the room as Desmond's father told him, "It's part of the Abstergo Entertainment operation."

"I thought Shaun was doing that."

"He's only part of it. John is one of our people inside Entertainment."

"Except he's **not** one of our people," inserted Spencer.

"Huh?"

William exchanged a quick glance with Spencer. "He's working for us. He's not officially one of us. Not yet."

"I hope he never is, Bill! I can't put my finger on it, but something about that guy just screams 'wackjob'!"

"Geez, Spencer, first Snowden, then John... it's like you don't want **anyone** to join the Assassins." The baby started to whine again, and Desmond instinctively rocked him back and forth to calm him, which seemed to work.

"Oh, Bill," Spencer addressed the Mentor. "You missed the big name reveal."

"Did I?" William looked a bit sheepish.

"Andrew Clayton Miles, seven pounds two ounces," answered Stacey from her desk. "Born to Desmond Nicholas Miles at 4:40 AM on August 5, 2013 after an estimated thirteen hours of labor. Genetically derived from Desmond and from Clay Kaczmarek, who had digitally stored his DNA and consciousness in the Animus." She looked up from the folder in front of her. "I had a tough time on that last part. Describing Clay."

"You're writing all that in my file?" Desmond asked.

"It's in yours too, but this one is **his**." She held up a newly assembled chart, much thinner than Desmond's.

"That stuff's private, right?" The pitch of Desmond's voice went up a bit. "You're not allowed to let anyone else see it, right?"

"HIPAA doesn't apply to Assassins," she said playfully, "but for you, Desmond, I'll keep Andrew's origin hush-hush. Oh, this is a little off topic, but I've been wondering: did Clay have a middle name?"

"Uh. Lemme think." Desmond closed his eyes. He'd managed to wall off the other man's memories so he wouldn't develop some sort of split personality, but he could access them if he wanted. He mentally dove in and reached for Clay's own life among the multitudinous ancestors he'd been made to relive.

A childhood remembrance. A mother's voice, raised in anger. _"Clay Alan Kaczmarek! You are in big trouble when Harold gets home!"_

Desmond returned to himself, the process not dissimilar from exiting the Animus. "It's Alan."

"Alan. As in Rikkin?" Spencer looked incredulous.

"What? You think they're connected somehow? Other than by one of them hacking the other one's stuff?" Desmond scoffed. "Come on, man, there are such things as coincidences!"

Stacey cleared her throat. "You'd better get a diaper on him soon, Desmond. We can't predict when he'll have his first bowel movement."

"Uh, can someone else do this one for me? I'm still, like, super tired and shit."

William glared at him.

"Okay, fine! I'll do it," Desmond said. "If someone will bring me the diaper."

Diapering the living squirming Andrew was a wholly different animal than diapering the lifeless plush Ezio, but Desmond managed it after a couple of false starts. "There ya go, kiddo. Try not to make me hafta change you too often, okay?"

"See, you did fine, you're not too tired." William patted his shoulder. "As I said before, you're going to make an excellent father."

* * *

><p>It took five hours to get to Montreal. Another hour to rendezvous with the Assassins there and get geared up. Then forty minutes to get through traffic to reach Abstergo Entertainment's huge tower, and a further two minutes to get through the security checkpoint at the entrance. Five seconds after that, Rebecca spotted the coffee stand at the far end of the atrium and made a beeline for it. "Ohh, my savior!"<p>

"Beg pardon?"

"I re-eee-eally needa get some caffeine in me right now. Like, ASAP."

"What'll it be then?"

"Surprise me, but make sure it's something with a real kick, I barely got any sleep last night."

"Hm." Shaun began to prepare a strong espresso, easily acting uninterested. He didn't see the anticipatory look on her face when she spoke next.

"I was staying up helping my friend have a baby!"

Shaun's grip on the paper cup slackened and he almost dropped it. "Ah... Doesn't a doctor usually help with that?"

"Oh, Didi had a homebirth. No doctor. There was a midwife though."

"Christ, that's an idiotic name. I hope she didn't saddle the kid with a similar moniker."

She pouted. "Well, I think Didi and Andrew are both very nice names."

"No accounting for taste, I suppose." The espresso was ready, but he kept the chit-chat going. "So if this Didi person had a midwife to hand, how'd you get roped into helping too?"

"I provided emotional support. It's hard work popping out a kid, y'know. And Didi's husband isn't there for her anymore."

"Oh, scampered off, did he? Found someone with a less stupid name?"

"He was a vet. PTSD." She lowered her voice. "Suicide."

"Tragic. Truly tragic," Shaun said with true sympathy for the semi-true story. "Well, that'll be four-sixty-seven."

"Here's a fiver, keep the change, handsome." Rebecca sipped the espresso. "Woah, maybe I spoke too soon. Your coffee is shit. Can I have my change back?"

Shaun was formulating a proper comeback to the insult when a new voice entered the conversation. "Uh, are you the courier?"

The source of the question was a young woman holding one of those Abstergo tablets, nervously running her fingernail over the beveled edge.

"Yep, that'd be me," Rebecca chirped, setting down the shitty coffee. "So how should we do this? Wireless data transfer?"

"I guess so, yeah," the Abstergo employee said timidly.

The two women tapped at their tablets briefly.

"Great! That should do it! We'll email you the receipt." Rebecca slipped her tablet back in her messenger bag, re-picked up her coffee, and walked briskly out of the building at a pace that was casual yet swift.

"Receipt? What receipt?"

Shaun adjusted his glasses and addressed the employee. "Here's a tip, newbie: Don't ask too many questions. And sometimes, even a single question is too many."

* * *

><p>"You sure this kid is me and Clay's?" Desmond asked, holding both Andrew and a bottle of formula as one drank from the other.<p>

"DNA doesn't lie," Stacey said from her desk, bent over a chart.

"Well, he doesn't look like me, and he doesn't look like Clay. Except the eyes, but lots of people have blue eyes."

"Pretty much every newborn has blue eyes, Pops."

"God, Colin, don't call me that! Can't you just call me **Desmond** for once in your life!?"

"Oh, but I've already called you Desmond once in my life. I had to change it up after that, keep things interesting." Colin rubbed his chin and scrutinized the baby. "Andrew, huh?"

"Lemme guess, you're not gonna use his name more than once either?"

"Did you know it's derived from the Greek term 'andros'?"

"No, I didn't," he admitted. "Of course I didn't. You and Shaun are the only ones who know obscure shit like that."

"It's quite a fitting name. Since he's 'of a man'."

"I guess my subconscious was really clever picking that one, then," Desmond said with a hint of sarcasm.

"Man, of course he doesn't look like you or Clay, he's a baby! And you two aren't!" Spencer laughed. "But actually... I think he kind of **does** resemble his two dads."

"How so?" Desmond asked.

"Well, he's got the same kind of..." Spencer gestured to the baby's forehead, "...sticky-outy brow thing as you and Clay."

"I have a 'sticky-outy brow thing'?" Desmond rolled his eyes up and backwards, trying to see for himself.

"Not as much as Clay did, but yeah. Plus... you're kinda tan, and Clay's kinda pale, and Andrew's kinda... medium."

"Oookay. That's kind of a stretch." Andrew spat out the bottle and a rivulet of formula with it. Desmond dabbed it up with a corner of the towel. "Anyway, I didn't mean I literally don't think he's Clay's. I just meant I couldn't see a resemblance. He just looks like a baby."

"You saying all babies look the same? That's racist! I mean, that's ageist!" Spencer said with mock offense.

"Speaking of how babies look," Colin had his camera out and up to his eye. "You two ready for your close-up?"

"Yeah, I guess we gotta start filling up the blank pages in that album." Desmond clumsily adjusted his arms to make Andrew face the camera.

Colin took the shot and then held out the photo for inspection.

"Damn, I look like shit," Desmond observed, noting the bags under his eyes and the godawful state of his hair.

"Ah, but you've got that new mommy glow," Colin said warmly.

"Do **not** fucking call me a mommy. Never ever ever. Or else I will fucking murder your ass."

"Oi, you want to watch your language around the little one?"

"You're not his dad, Colin! I'm his dad, and I say it's okay for him to hear swears."

"But you know, he'll be talkin' before you know it, and he'll pick up the profanity and echo it back."

Desmond rolled his eyes. "So what if he does? Everything is permitted, remember? Censorship is kind of counter to our whole philosophy."

* * *

><p>After what seemed like hours, Stacey finally let them leave the infirmary.<p>

"Well, here ya go. You, uh... this is your room. Our room. It used to be just my room, but now we gotta share it." After a brief struggle with legs and arms that didn't want to go into leg and arm holes, Desmond managed to get Andrew dressed and carefully placed him in the crib. "You sleep here, and I sleep in this bed over here. I'll be right there if you need anything, so-" He stopped and shook his head slightly. "Geez, I'm talking to you like I expect you to understand or something." He leaned over the crib railing. "Well, at least I haven't slipped into baby talk. If I start to do that, then I'm a completely lost cause."

Andrew stared blankly at Desmond. Desmond stared blankly at Andrew. He reached down and gently rubbed the small patch of brown hair. "Still hard to believe you really happened. But you did happen. You weren't planned or expected at all, but you sure as hell happened." Desmond felt overwhelmed, and remembered then that he hadn't really slept for... _How long has it been? Everything seems to blur together... Today is the fifth, and he took all of yesterday evening and last night to be born..._

Andrew yawned, and Desmond couldn't help but smile. "Heh. Are you as tired as I am, kiddo? Was it exhausting for you too? Let's have ourselves a nice nap, you and me."

* * *

><p>And thus ends <em>Kryptokos<em>! Thanks for reading!

I hope you enjoyed it, but then again what kind of idiot would read this entire monstrosity if they didn't enjoy it? So let me rephrase that: I'm glad you enjoyed it :D

**What do you suppose will happen next, though?!**

Does Clay Kaczmarek live on as Desmond's son?

Does Edward Snowden become an Assassin?

How will Desmond react when he finds out what Abstergo Entertainment is up to?

Does he get periods now that he isn't pregnant anymore?

Does he ever find out why Stacey was discharged from the Air Force?

Does he ever find someone who will love him, mangina and all?

Does anyone else ever find out Andrew is an mpreg baby?

Does Desmond teach him to speak a shitload of languages?

Is Andrew part of some crazy prophecy?

Some, or perhaps all, of these questions will be answered in the...

**~~~~SEQUEL~~~~**

But for now... stay tuned for the epilogue.


	35. Epilogue

October 2012

Clay Kaczmarek knew every single byte of the digital environment that he'd lived in for the past few months, and he was bored with the lot of it. So the moment Desmond appeared, Clay's consciousness hastily and greedily scanned every iota of new information contained in the comatose man's body.

Boredom wasn't the sole reason he did so, though. He had been tasked with helping Desmond Miles, and the best way to do that, he reasoned, was by knowing everything about him. In addition, Clay predicted that Desmond would be more comfortable on Animus Island, less traumatized by being there, if he had an avatar to represent him. Of course he would, since he was still alive, still invested in his physical form. The system that normally did this had been shut down along with everything else. And so he catalogued Desmond's body in its entirety to create such an avatar. Although he was unable to know what clothes the man preferred and how long his facial hair currently was, he made an educated guess based on how William had described him.

The uterus puzzled Clay. No, more than puzzled. It downright **baffled** him. He swept over the anatomy again to be sure. Yes. That was definitely a uterus, yet the rest of Desmond was definitely male, right down to his chromosomes. How could this be?

_Some sicko experimentation courtesy of those Abstergo sons of bitches, surely. But what in the world **for**? Did they plan to make him carry his own clone? So they'd have a backup copy of his genes? So they could put the baby Desmond in the Animus instead of the recalcitrant adult version? I knew they were twisted, but that's..._

_No. That's not very plausible. They're twisted, not stupid. They'd have to know that such a radically unprecedented surgery as implanting a uterus in a man would carry a massive risk of death for the subject. And they needed him alive, at least for a little while. And none of their data suggested they were doing any sort of clone-related research. If they wanted to copy his DNA into a fresher, more malleable subject, it'd have been much easier for them to simply extract his sperm and fertilize some whore of the Order._

_But if not Abstergo... then how? How else would this- Ah. Of course. It's October tenth. He's come into contact with that Apple. When it comes to Pieces of Eden, what we know about their capabilities is only the tip of a very, **very** large iceberg. That's got to be how. But that still leaves the question of why._

Desmond's avatar began to stir on the simulated sand. He was waking up. He would need to find the synch nexus as soon as possible. Which meant he would need guidance as soon as possible. Clay shelved the uterus conundrum for later pondering.

* * *

><p>Desmond didn't realize it of course, but Clay scanned his body many times more in the following days.<p>

Something was happening.

Clay was no doctor, but Abstergo had plenty of doctors, and he'd hacked enough of their files to know the meaning of this new chemical structure, this hormone he was beginning to detect.

_Desmond. You didn't know. Of course you didn't know. How could you- how could **anyone** have known? But now **I** know. I know exactly what she's planning. You'll toddle along to Turin, unlock the seal, play the hero, and her spirit will be freed. But she can't wreak her vengeance without a physical body. So she manipulated you, combined your First Civ genes and hers, implanted the seed of humanity's downfall in the womb of its savior._

_But maybe, just maybe... Maybe she can't inhabit the newly-formed mind if it's already occupied... if someone gets there before her._

A voice called out his Abstergo-assigned number. "Sixteen?"

Clay produced his visual manifestation. "Desmond... I call you by your name. You could do the same for me."

The erstwhile Subject Seventeen looked contrite. "Oh, right. Clay. Sorry."

"Right. Now. Think about this... What if I went with you?"

"With me? Where?"

"In your-" Clay stopped. _Better not to say 'unborn child'. Not just yet, at least. He wouldn't believe he even had one. His psyche is fractured enough without having to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. He'll find out in time. In due time._

"In my brain?" He looked somewhere between squeamish and downright horrified at the concept.

_Sure, let's let him assume that's what I meant._ "It could work. Just for a while. Until I found a way out. Another body maybe, or uh... I don't know. I just... I don't want to be here anymore."

Desmond backed away. "That's... that's not going to happen... Sorry," he added as an afterthought.

"No... heh... I guess I had my chance." Clay put on a show of crumpling in defeat before dematerializing his avatar. _Perhaps he would agree, if only I told him I wouldn't be in his brain, but in the child's. Or perhaps he'd take my assertion that he was pregnant as proof of my lunacy. Perhaps he'd stop trusting this digital madman, decide to stop following his directions, stop seeking the synch nexus. Can't have that happen. Definitely not._

_There's still time. The nervous system hasn't differentiated from the rest of the embryo yet. I can wait. Wait and ask him again. Desmond is painfully slow at progressing through these memories. Was I that slow, back when I first began? Can I even describe that person as "I"? ...Oh, let's not go down that existential rabbit hole again. Where was I, whoever I am? ...Yes, he'll take several days at least to finish Ezio off. I can try again. I **must** try again. I was told to help him. If my idea works, I'll be helping the entire world._

_Would it even work, though? It was challenge enough converting analog neural impulses into binary computer code, even with the "help", such as it was, from those pesky Precursors. Could I, on my own, figure out how to convert in reverse? Would I lose mental resolution in the process, introduce unwanted artifacts into my consciousness? Would the child's brain even have sufficient storage capacity? Yes, that last one's the real issue. Don't they say your brain isn't fully developed until twenty-five? Even if that's a myth, am I really going to be able to cram thirty years of life experience into the incipient neurons of an embryo? Probably not. But nevertheless, I have to try._

_Or... perhaps I don't have to. Perhaps there is another way. Perhaps..._ Clay probed at the contents of Desmond's uterus again. _Yes. I thought as much. The genome is a triple helix. If I wasn't already sure this was Juno's plot, then this would cinch it. She can't live in a human body, can she? She wouldn't want to, anyway, her arrogance wouldn't allow her to._

* * *

><p>Clay stretched out his arms and grinned maniacally. "Here it comes!"<p>

The simulated landscape was breaking down, hundreds upon hundreds of digital fragments falling upwards as Desmond watched in confused horror. "What is this?! What's going on?!"

"This is the end, Desmond! Scheduled for deletion!" The Clay avatar was fading, and Desmond thought he'd vanished completely until he heard footsteps run towards him and felt strong arms holding him tight.

"What are you doing?"

The reply was even more enigmatic than usual. "What is a man but the sum of his memories?" gloated a voice loudly in Desmond's virtual ear. "We are the stories we live! The tales we tell our children!"

He entwined himself into the other man's very being, splitting his mental focus in twain: shielding Desmond from the Animus's attempts to delete the "virus" it saw him as, and concurrently seeking out the encoded DNA strands in the unborn, unknown, unhuman child. The latter was the more complex task by far, and Clay only hoped he could alter the genome enough to render the baby useless to Juno, if not make it fully human.

He could feel Desmond's struggles, feel his fear, his anger, his sorrow, his utter helplessness as he was made to relive every memory of Clay's life in a tortuously slow instant.

"Don't do this!"

"I'm saving you, idiot!" he yelled. "I'm saving all of us!" His voice was hot with rage but his mind remained cool, even as it began to dissolve away from the ravages of the failsafe. _Desmond. Do forgive me. I know this isn't fun for you. I did try to ask your consent. But this... this is too important. I'm not doing this for myself. I'm doing this for humanity._

_However... if this does allow me a second chance at life... I certainly won't turn it down._

* * *

><p>OMG! The epilogue is a flashback! Bet y'all didn't expect that!<p>

Thanks so much to all my dear commenters/reviewers. Feedback is this writer's lifeblood.

Keep an eye out for the sequel, _Because of You_, to start being posted in early 2015. But first I'm focusing back on the long-delayed final chapter of _Rendezvous at Monteriggioni_.

Oh, and "happy" Desmond Remembrance Day. *shakes fist at Ubisoft*


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